THE HERMIT HUNTER OF THE WILDS.
CHAPTER I.
BY THE FIRELIGHT.
OMMY TALISKER was probably one of the most unassuming boys that ever lived. At all events everybody said so. And this is equivalent to stating that the boy’s general behaviour gave him a character for modesty.
He was the youngest of a family of five; the eldest being his only sister, and she, like her mother, made a good deal of Tommy, and thought a good deal about him too in certain ways.
“I don’t think,” said Tommy’s father to Tommy’s mother one evening as they all sat round the parlour hearth; “I don’t think we’ll ever be able to make much of Tommy.”
Perhaps Tommy’s father was at present merely speaking for speaking’s sake; for there had been general silence for a short time previously, broken only by the sound of mother’s knitting-wires, the crackle of uncle’s newspaper as he turned it, and the howthering of the wind round the old farmhouse.
Tommy’s mother looked at Tommy, and heaved a little bit of a sigh, for she was very much given to taking everything for granted that her husband said.
But Tommy’s sister, who always sat in the left-hand corner of the fireside, with Tommy squatting on a footstool right in front of her, drew the lad’s head closer to her knee, and smoothed his white brow and his yellow hair.