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WHEN GHOST MEETS GHOST

WHEN GHOST MEETS GHOST

BY

WILLIAM DE MORGAN

AUTHOR OF "JOSEPH VANCE," "ALICE-FOR-SHORT," ETC.

NEW YORK

Copyright, 1914,

BY

HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY

Published February, 1914

Dedicated to
The Spirit of Fiction

WHEN GHOST MEETS GHOST

PART I

CHAPTER 0

A CONNECTING-LINK BETWEEN THE WRITER AND THE STORY, AMOUNTING TO VERY LITTLE. THERE WAS A COURT SOME FIFTY YEARS SINCE IN LONDON, SOMEWHERE, THAT IS NOW NOWHERE. THAT'S ALL!

Some fifty years ago there still remained, in a street reachable after inquiry by turning to the left out of Tottenham Court Road, a rather picturesque Court with an archway; which I, the writer of this story, could not find when I tried to locate it the other day. I hunted for it a good deal, and ended by coming away in despair and going for rest and refreshment to a new-born teashop, where a number of young ladies had lost their individuality, and the one who brought my tea was callous to me and mine because you pay at the desk. But she had an orderly soul, for she turned over the lump of sugar that had a little butter on it, so as to lie on the buttery side and look more tidy-like.

If the tea had been China tea, fresh-made, it might have helped me to recollecting the name of that Court, which I am sorry to say I have forgotten. But it was Ceylon and had stood. However, it was hot. Only you will never convince me that it was fresh-made, not even if you have me dragged asunder by wild horses. Its upshot was, for the purpose of this story, that it did not help me to recollect the name of that Court.

I have to confess with shame that I have written the whole of what follows under a false pretence; having called it out of its name, to the best of my belief, throughout. I know it had a name. It does not matter; the story can do without accuracy—commonplace matter of fact!

But do what I will, I keep on recollecting new names for it, and each seems more plausible than the other. Coltsfoot Court, Barretts Court, Chesterfield Court, Sapps Court! Any one of these, if I add seventeen-hundred-and-much, or eighteen-hundred-and-nothing-to-speak-of, seems to fit this Court to a nicety. Suppose we make it Sapps Court, and let it go at that!

Oh, the little old corners of the world that were homes and are gone! Years hence the Court we will call Sapps will still dwell in some old mind that knew its every brick, and be portrayed to credulous hearers yet unborn as an unpretentious Eden, by some laudator of its tempus actum—some forgotten soul waiting for emancipation in an infirmary or almshouse.

Anyhow, I can remember this Court, and can tell a tale it plays a part in, only not very quick.

Anybody might have passed down the main street and never noticed it, because its arched entry didn't give on the street, but on a bay or cul-de-sac just long enough for a hansom to drive into but not to turn round in. There was nothing to arrest the attention of the passer-by, self-absorbed or professionally engaged; simultaneous possibilities, in his case.

But if the passer-by forgot himself and neglected his proper function in life at the moment that he came abreast of this cul-de-sac, he may have thereby come to the knowledge of Sapps Court; and, if a Londoner, may have wondered why he never knew of it before. For there was nothing in the external appearance of its arched entry to induce him to face the difficulties incidental to entering it. He may even have nursed intentions of saying to a friend who prided himself on his knowledge of town:—"I say, Old Cock, you think yourself mighty clever and all that, but I bet you can't tell me where Sapps Court is." If, however, he never went down Sapps Court at all—merely looked at his inscription and, recollecting his own place in nature, passed on—I shouldn't be surprised.

It went downhill under the archway when you did go in, and you came to a step. If you did not tumble owing to the suddenness and depth of this step, you came to another; and were stupefied by reaching the ground four inches sooner than you expected, and made conscious that your skeleton had been driven an equal distance upwards through your system. Then you could see Sapps Court, but under provocation, from its entry. When you recovered your temper you admitted that it was a better Court than you had anticipated.

All the residences were in a row on the left, and there was a dead wall on the right with an inscription on a stone in it that said the ground twelve inches beyond belonged to somebody else. This wall was in the confidence of the main street, lending itself to a fiction that the houses therein had gardens or yards behind them. They hadn't; but the tenants believed they had, and hung out chemises and nightgowns and shirts to dry in the areas they built up their faith on; and really, if they were properly wrung out afore hung up there was nothing to complain of, because the blacks didn't hold on, not to crock, but got shook off or blew away of theirselves. We put this in the language of our informant.

However, the story has no business on the other side of this wall. What concerns it is the row of houses on the left.

If ever a row of houses bore upon them the stamp of having been overtaken and surrounded by an unexpected city, these did. The wooden palings that still skirted the breathing-room in front of them almost said aloud to every newcomer:—"Where is the strip of land gone that we could see beyond, day by day; that belonged to God-knows-who; whose further boundary was the road the haycarts brought their loads on, drawn by deliberate horses that had bells?" The persistent sunflowers that still struggled into being behind them told tales of how big they were in youth, years ago, when they could turn to the sun and hope to catch his eye. The stray wallflowers murmured to all who had ears to hear:—"This is how we smelt in days gone by—but oh!—so much stronger!" The wooden shutters, outside the ground-floors that really stood upon the ground, told, if you chose to listen, of how they kept the houses safe from thieves in moonlit nights a century ago; and the doors between them—for each house was three windows wide—opened straight into the kitchen. So they were, or had been, cottages. But the miscreant in possession twenty years ago, instigated by a jerry-builder, had added a storey and removed the tiled roofs whose garrets were every bit as good as the jerry-built rooms that took their place. Sapp himself may have done it—one knows nothing of his principles—and at the same time in a burst of overweening vanity called his cottages his Court. But one rather likes to think that Sapp was with his forbears when this came about, when the wall was built up opposite, and the cottages could no longer throw their dust everywhere, but had to resort to a common dustbin at the end of the Court, which smelt so you could smell it quite plain across the wall when the lid was off. That dustbin was the outward and visible sign of the decadence of Sapp.

CHAPTER I

OF DAVE AND DOLLY WARDLE AND THEIR UNCLE MOSES, WHO HAD BEEN A PRIZEFIGHTER, AND THEIR AUNT M'RIAR, WHO KEPT AN EYE ON THEM. OF DAVE'S SERVICES TO THE PUBLIC, AND OF ANOTHER PUBLIC THAT NEARLY MADE UNCLE MO BANKRUPT. OF HIS PAST BATTLES, NOTABLY ONE WITH A SWEEP. OF MRS. PRICHARD AND MRS. BURR, WHO LIVED UPSTAIRS. OF A BAD ACCIDENT THAT BEFELL DAVE, AND OF SIMEON STYLITES. HOW UNCLE MO STRAPPED UP DAVE'S HEAD WITH DIACHYLUM BOUGHT BY A VERY BAD BOY, MICHAEL RAGSTROAR, THE LIKE OF WHOM YOU NEVER! OF THE JUDGEMENT OF SOLOMON, AND DAVE'S CAT

In the last house down the Court, the one that was so handy to the dustbin, lived a very small boy and a still smaller sister. There were other members of the household—to wit, their Uncle Moses and their Aunt M'riar, who were not husband and wife, but respectively brother and sister of Dave's father and mother. Uncle Moses' name was Wardle, Aunt M'riar's that of a deceased or vanished husband. But Sapps Court was never prepared to say offhand what this name was, and "Aunt M'riar" was universal. So indeed was "Uncle Mo"; but, as No. 7 had been spoken of as "Wardle's" since his brother took the lower half of the house for himself and his first wife, with whom he had lived there fifteen years, the name Wardle had come to be the name of the house. This brother had been some ten years younger than Moses, and had had apparently more than his fair share of the family weddings; as "old Mo," if he ever was married, had kept the lady secret; from his brother's family certainly, and presumably from the rest of the world.

Our little boy was the sort of boy you were sorry was ever going to be eleven, because at five years and ten months he was that square and compact, that chunky and yet that tender, that no right-minded person could desire him to be changed to an impudent young scaramouch like young Michael Ragstroar four doors higher up, who was eleven and a regular handful.

His name was Dave Wardle, after his father; and his sister's Dorothea, after her mother. Both names appeared on a tombstone in the parish churchyard, and you might have thought they was anybody, said Public Opinion; which showed that Dave and his sister were orphans. Both had recollections of their father, but the funeral he indulged in three years since had elbowed other memories out of court. Of their mother they only knew by hearsay, as Dave was only three years old when his sister committed matricide, quite unconsciously, and you could hear her all the way up the Court. Pardon the story's way of introducing attestations to some fact of interest or importance in the language in which its compiler has received it.

They were good children to do with, said their Aunt M'riar, so long as you kep' an eye. And a good job they were, because who was to do her work if she was every minute prancing round after a couple of young monkeys? This was a strained way of indicating the case; but there can be no doubt of its substantial truth. So Aunt M'riar felt at rest so long as Dave was content to set up atop of the dustbin-lid and shout till he was hoarse; all the while using a shovel, that was public property, as a gong.

Perhaps Dave took his sister Dolly into his confidence about the nature of the trust he conceived himself to hold in connection with this dustbin. To others of the inhabitants he was reticent, merely referring to an emolument he was entitled to. "The man on the lid," he said, "has a farden." He said this with such conviction that few had the heart to deny the justice of the claim outright, resorting to subterfuges to evade a cash settlement. One had left his change on the piano; another was looking forward to an early liquidation of small liabilities on the return of his ship to port; another would see about it next time Sunday come of a Friday, and so on. But only his Uncle Moses ever gave him an actual farthing, and Dave deposited it in a cat on the mantelshelf, who was hollow by nature, and provided by art with a slot in the dorsal vertebræ. It could be shook out if you wanted it, and Dave occasionally took it out of deposit in connection with a course of experiments he was interested in. He wished to determine how far he could spit it out.

This inquiry was a resource against ennui on rainy days and foggy days and days that were going to clear up later. All these sorts were devised by the malignity of Providence for the confusion of small boys yearning to be on active service, redistributing property, obstructing traffic, or calling attention to personal peculiarities of harmless passers-by. But it was not so inexhaustible but that cases occurred when those children got that unsettled and masterful there was no abiding their racket; and as for Dolly, her brother was making her every bit as bad as himself. At such times a great resource was to induce Uncle Moses to tell some experiences of a glorious past, his own. For he had been a member of the Prize Ring, and had been slapped on the back by Dukes, and had even been privileged to grasp a Royal hand. He was now an unwieldy giant, able to get about with a stick when the day was fine, but every six months less inclined for the effort.

Uncle Moses, when he retired from public life, had put all his winnings, which were considerable, into a long lease of a pot-house near Golden Square, where he was well-known and very popular. If, however, there had been a rock on the premises and he had had all the powers of his namesake, four-half would have had to run as fast from it as ever did water from the rock in Horeb, to keep down the thirst of Golden Square. For Uncle Moses not only refused to take money from old friends who dwelt in his memory, but weakly gave way to constructive allegations of long years of comradeship in a happy past, which his powers of recollection did not enable him to contradict. "Wot, old Moses!—you'll never come for to go for to say you've forgot old Swipey Sam, jist along in the Old Kent Road—Easy Shavin' one 'apenny or an arrangement come to by the week!" Or merely, "Seein' you's as good as old times come alive again, mate." Suchlike appeals were almost invariable from any customer who got fair speech of Uncle Moses in his own bar. In his absence these claims were snuffed out roughly by a prosaic barman—even the most pathetic ones, such as that of an extinct thimblerigger for whom three small thimbles and one little pea had ceased for ever, years ago, when he got his fingers in a sausage-machine. But Uncle Moses was so much his own barman that this generosity told heavily against his credit; and he would certainly have been left a pauper but for the earnest counsels of an old friend known in his circle of Society as Affability Bob, although his real name was Jeremiah Alibone. By him he was persuaded to dispose of the lease of the "Marquess of Montrose" while it still had some value, and to retire on a pound a week. This might have been more had he invested all the proceeds in an annuity. "But, put it I do!" said he. "I don't see my way to no advantage for David and Dorothy, and this here young newcome, if I was to hop the twig." For this was at the time of the birth of little Dave, nearly six years before the date of this story.

Affability Bob applauded his friend's course of action in view of its motive. "But," said he, "I tell you this, Moses. If you'd 'a' gone on standin' Sam to every narrycove round about Soho much longer, 'No effects' would have been your vardict, sir." To which Uncle Moses replied, "Right you are, old friend," and changed the subject.

However, there you have plenty to show what a rich mine of past experience Uncle Moses had to dig in. The wonder was that Dave and Dolly refused to avail themselves of its wealth, always preferring a monotonous repetition of an encounter their uncle had had with a Sweep. He could butt, this Sweep could, like a battering-ram, ketching hold upon you symultaneous round the gaiters. He was irresistible by ordinary means, his head being unimpressionable by direct impact. But Uncle Moses had been one too many for him, having put a lot of thinking into the right way of dealing with his system.

He had perceived that the hardest head, struck evenly on both sides at the same moment, must suffer approximately as much as if jammed against the door-post and catched full with a fair round swing. Whereas had these blows followed one another on a yielding head, the injury it inflicted as a battering-ram might have outweighed the damage it received in inflicting it. As it was, Peter—so Uncle Moses called the Sweep—was for one moment defenceless, being preoccupied in seizing his opponent by the ankles; and although his cranium had no sinuses, and was so thick it could crush a quart-pot like an opera-hat, it did not court a fourth double concussion, and this time he was destined to disappoint his backers.

His opponent, who in those days was known as the Hanley Linnet, suffered very little in the encounter. No doubt you know that a man in fine training can take an amazing number of back-falls on fair ground, clear of snags and brickbats; and, of course, the Linnet's seconds made a special point of this, examining careful and keeping an eye to prevent the introduction of broke-up rubbish inside the ropes by parties having an interest, or viciously disposed.

"There you are again, Uncle Mo, a-tellin' and a-tellin' and a-tellin'!" So Aunt M'riar would say when she heard this narrative going over well-known ground for the thousandth time. "And them children not lettin' you turn round in bed, I call it!" This was in reference to Dave and Dolly's severity about the text. The smallest departure from the earlier version led to both them children pouncing at once. Dave would exclaim reproachfully:—"You did say a Sweep with one blind eye, Uncle Mo!" and Dolly would confirm his words with as much emphasis as her powers of speech allowed. "Essoodid, a 'Weep with one b'ind eye!"—also reproachfully. Then Uncle Moses would supply a corrected version of whatever was defective, in this case an eye not quite blind, but nearly, owing to a young nipper, no older than Dave, aiming a broken bottle at him as the orficers was conducting of him to the Station, after a fight Wandsworth way, the other party being took off to the Horspital for dead.

The Jews, I am told, won't stand any nonsense when they have their sacred writings copied, always destroying every inaccurate MS. the moment an error is spotted in it. Dave and Dolly were not the Jews, but they were as intolerant of variation in the text of this almost sacred legend of the Sweep. "S'ow me how you punched him, wiv Dave's head," Dolly would say; and she would be most exacting over the dramatic rendering of this ancient fight. "Percisely this way like I'm showing you—only harder," was Uncle Moses' voucher for his own accuracy. "Muss harder?" inquired Dolly. "Well—a tidy bit harder!" said the veteran with truth. The head of the Sweep's understudy, Dave, was not equal to a full-dress rehearsal. So Dolly had to be content with the promise of a closer reading of the part when her brother was growed up.

But it was rather like Aunt M'riar said, for Uncle Moses. Those two young Turks didn't allow their uncle no latitude, in the manner of speaking. He couldn't turn round in bed.

These rainy days, when the children could not possibly be allowed out, taxed their guardians' patience just to the point of making them—suppose we say—not ungrateful to Providence when old Mrs. Prichard upstairs giv' leave for the children to come and play up in her room. She was the only other in-dweller in the house, living in the front and back attics with Mrs. Burr, who took jobs out in the dressmaking, and very moderate charges. When Mrs. Burr worked at home, Mrs. Prichard enjoyed her society and knitted, while Mrs. Burr cut out and basted. Very few remarks were passed; for though Mrs. Burr was snappish now and again, company was company, and Mrs. Prichard she put up with a little temper at times, because we all had our trials; and Mrs. Burr was considered good at heart, though short with you now and again. Hence when loneliness became irksome, Mrs. Prichard found Dave and Dolly a satisfaction, so long as nothing was broke. It was a pleasant extension of the experience of their early youth to play at monarchs, military celebrities, professional assassins, and so on, in old Mrs. Prichard's room upstairs. And sometimes nothing was broke. Otherwise one day at No. 7, Sapps Court, was much the same as another.

Uncle Mo's residence in Sapps Court dated many years before the coming of Aunt M'riar; in fact, as far back as the time he was deprived of his anchorage in Soho. He was then taken in by his brother, recently a widower; and no question had ever arisen of his quitting the haven he had been, as it were, towed into as a derelict; until, some years later, David announced that he was thinking of Dolly Tarver at Ealing. Moses smoked through a pipe in silence, so as to give full consideration; then said, like an easy-going old boy as he was:—"You might do worse, Dave. I can clear out, any minute. You've only got to sing out." To which his brother had replied:—"Don't you talk of clearing out, not till Miss Tarver she tells you." Moses' answer was:—"I'm agreeable, Dave"; and the matter dropped until some time after, when he had made Dolly Tarver's acquaintance. She, on hearing that her union with David would send Mo again adrift, had threatened to declare off if such a thing was so much as spoke of. So Moses had remained on, in the character of a permanency saturated with temporariness; and, when the little boy Dave began to take his place in Society, proceeded to appropriate—so said the child's parents—more than an uncle's fair share of him.

Then came the tragedy of his mother's death, causing the Court to go into mourning, and leaving Dave with a sister, too young to be conscious of responsibility for it. Not too young, however, to make her case heard—the case all living things have against the Power that creates them without so much as asking leave. The riot she made being interpreted by both father and uncle as protest against Mrs. Twiggins, a midwife who made herself disagreeable—or, strictly speaking, more disagreeable; being normally unpleasant, and apt to snap when spoke to, however civil—it was thought desirable to call in the help of her Aunt M'riar, who was living with her family at Ealing as a widow without incumbrance. Dolly junior appeared to calm down under Aunt M'riar's auspices, though every now and then her natural indignation got the better of her self-restraint. Dave junior was disgusted with his sister at first, but softened gradually towards her as she matured.

His father did not long survive the death of his young wife. Even an omnibus-driver is not exempt from inflammation of the lungs, although the complaint is not so fatal among persons exposed to all weathers as among leaders of indoor lives. A violent double pneumonia carried off Uncle Mo's brother, six months after he became a widower, and about three years before the date of this story.

Whether in some other class of life a marriageable uncle and aunt—sixty and forty respectively—would have accepted their condominium of the household that was left, it is not for the story to discuss. Uncle Moses refused to give up the two babies, and Aunt M'riar refused to leave them, and—as was remarked by both—there you were! It was an impasse. The only effect it had on the position was that Uncle Mo's temporariness got a little boastful, and slighted his permanency. The latter, however, paid absolutely no attention to the insult, and the only change that took place in the three following years at No. 7, Sapps Court, had nothing to do with the downstairs tenants. Some months before the first date of the story, a variation came about in the occupancy upstairs, Mrs. Prichard and Mrs. Burr taking the place of some parties who, if the truth was told, were rather a riddance. The fact is merely recorded as received; nothing further has transpired regarding these persons.

Mrs. Prichard was a very old lady who seldom showed herself outside of her own room—so the Court testified—but who, when she did so, impressed the downstairs tenants as of unfathomable antiquity and a certain pictorial appearance, causing Uncle Mo to speak of her as an old picter, and Dave to misapprehend her name. For he always spoke of her as old Mrs. Picture. Mrs. Burr dawned upon the Court as a civil-spoken person who was away most part of the day, and who did not develope her identity vigorously during the first year of her tenancy. One is terribly handicapped by one's own absence, as a member of any Society.

As time went on, Dave and Dolly, who began life with an idea that Sapps Court was the Universe, became curious about what was going on outside. They grew less contented with the dustbin, and ambition dictated to Dave an enthronement on an iron post at the entrance, under the archway. The delight of sitting on this post was so great that Dave willingly faced the fact that he could not get down, and whenever he could persuade anyone to put him up ran a risk of remaining there sine die. When he could not induce a native of the Court to do this, he endeavoured to influence the outer public, not without success. For when it came to understand—that public—that the grubby little tenant of Dave's grubby little shirt and trousers was not asking the time nor for a hoyp'ny, but was murmuring shyly:—"I soy, mawster, put me up atop," at the same time slapping the post on either side with two grubby little, fat hands, it would unbend and comply, telling Dave to hold on tight, and never asking no questions how ever the child was to be got off of it when the time came. Because people are that selfish and inconsiderate.

The difficulty of getting down off of it all by himself, without a friendly supporting hand in the waistband of his trousers, was connected with the form of this post's head. It was not a disused twenty-four pounder with a shot in its muzzle, as so many posts are, but a real architectural post, cast from a pattern at the foundry. Its capital expanded at the top, and its projecting rim made its negotiation difficult to climbers, if small; hard to get round from below, and perilous to leave hold of all of a sudden-like, in order to grasp the shaft in descent. But then, it was this very expansion that provided a seat for Dave, which the other sort of post would hardly have afforded.

How did Simeon Stylites manage to scrat on? One prefers to think that an angel put him on his column, carrying him somewhat as one carries a cat; and called for him to be taken down at convenient intervals by appointment. The mind revolts at the idea that he really never came down, quite never! But then, when the starving man is on at the Aquarium, we—that is to say, the humane public—are apt to give way to mere maudlin sentimentalism, and hope he is cheating. And when a person at a Music Hall folds backwards and looks through his legs at us forwards, we always hope he feels no strain—nothing but a great and justifiable professional pride. It is not a pleasant feeling that any of these good people are suffering on our behalf. However, in the case of Simeon Stylites there was a mixture of motives, no doubt.

Dave Wardle was too young to have motives, and had none, unless the desire to surprise and impress Dolly had weight with him. But he had the longing on him which that young gentleman in the poem expressed by writing the Latin for taller on a flag; and to gratify it had scaled the dustbin as the merest infant. It was an Alpine record. But the iron post was no mere Matterhorn. It was like Peter Bot's Mountain; and once you was up, there you were, and no getting down!

The occasional phrases for which I am indebted to Aunt M'riar which have crept into the text recently—not, as I think, to its detriment—were used by her after a mishap which befell her nephew owing to the child's impatience. If he'd only a had the sense to set still a half a minute longer, she would have done them frills and could have run up the Court a'most as soon as look at you. But she hoped what had happened would prove a warning, not only to Dave, but to all little boys in a driving hurry to get off posts. And not only to them either, but to Youth generally, to pay attention to what was said to it by Age and Experience, neither of which ever climb up posts without some safe guarantee of being able to climb down again.

What had happened was that Dave had cut his head on the ornate plinth of that cast-iron post, his hands missing their grip as his legs caught the shaft, so that he turned over backwards and his occiput suffered. He showed a splendid spirit—quite Spartan, in fact—bearing in mind his uncle's frequent homilies on the subject of crying; a thing no little boy, however young, should dream of. Dolly was under no such obligation, according to Uncle Moses, being a female or the rudiment of one, and on this occasion she roared for herself and her brother, too. Aunt M'riar was in favour of taking the child to Mr. Ekins, the apothecary, for skilled surgery to deal with the case, but Uncle Moses scouted the idea.

"Twopenn'orth o' stroppin' and a basin o' warm water," said he, "and I'll patch him up equal to Guy's Hospital.... Got no diacklum? Then send one of those young varmints outside for it.... You've no call to go yourself." For a various crowd of various ages under twelve had come from nowhere to enjoy the tragic incident.

"Twopenn'orth of diaculum plaster off of Mr. Ekings the 'poarthecary?" said that young Michael Ragstroar, thrusting himself forward and others backward; because, you see, he was such a cheeky, precocious young vagabond. "Mean to say I can't buy twopenn'orth of diaculum plaster off of Mr. Ekings the 'poarthecary? Mean to say my aunt that orkupies a 'ouse in Chiswick clost to high-water mark don't send me to the 'poarthecaries just as often as not? For the mixture to be taken regular ... Ah!—where's the twopence? 'And over!"

Whereupon, such is the power of self-confidence over everyone else, that Aunt M'riar entrusted twopence to this youth, quite forgetting that he was only eleven. Yet her faith in him was not ill-founded, for he returned like an echo as to promptitude. Only, unlike the echo, he came back louder than he went, and more positive.

"There's the quorntity and no cheatin'," said he. "You can medger it up with a rule if you like. It'll medger, you find if it don't! Like I told you! And a 'apenny returned on the transaction." The tension of the situation did not admit of the measuring test—nor indeed had Aunt M'riar data to go upon—and as for the halfpenny, it stood over.

Uncle Moses had not laid false claim to surgical skill, and was able to strap the wound a'most as if he'd been brought up to it. By the time it was done Dave's courage was on the wane, and he wasn't sorry to lie his head down and shut to his eyes. Because the lids thereof were like the lids of plate-chests.

However, before he went off very sound asleep—so sound you might have took him for a image—he heard what passed between Uncle Moses and Michael, whose name has been spelt herein so that you should think of it as Sapps Court did; but its correct form is Rackstraw.

"Now, young potato-peelin's, how much money did the doctor hand you back for that diacklum?"

"Penny. Said he'd charge it up to the next Dook that come to his shop."

Thereupon Aunt M'riar taxed the speaker with perfidy. "Why, you little untrue, lyin', deceitful story," she said. "To think you should say it was only a ha'penny!"

"I never said no such a thing. S'elp me!"

"''Apenny returned on the transaction' was the very identical selfsame words." Thus Aunt M'riar testified. "And what is more," she added inconsecutively, "I do not believe you've any such an aunt, nor yet ever been to Chiswick."

But young potato-peelings, so called from his father's vocation of costermonger, defended himself with indignation. "Warn't that square?" said he. "He never said I warn't to keep it all, didn't that doctor!" Then he took a high position as of injured virtue. "There's your 'apenny! There's both your 'apennies! Mean to say I 'aven't kep' 'em safe for yer?" Uncle Moses allowed the position of bailee, but disposed of the penny as Solomon suggested in the case of the baby, giving one halfpenny to Michael, and putting the other in Dave's cat on the mantelshelf.

He justified this course afterwards on the ground that the doctor's refund was made to the actual negotiator, and that Aunt M'riar had in any case received full value for her money. Who could say that the doctor, if referred to, would not have repudiated Aunt M'riar's claim in toto?

Warnings, cautions, and moral lessons derived from this incident had due weight with Dave for several days; in fact, until his cut healed over. Then he forgot them and became as bad as ever.

CHAPTER II

HOW DAVE FAILED TO PROFIT BY HIS EXPERIENCE. OF PAOLO TOSCANELLI AND CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. OF A NEW SHORE DAVE AND DOLLY REACHED BY EXPLORATION, ROUND THE CORNER; AND OF OTHER NAVIGATORS WHO HAD, IN THIS CASE, MADE IT FOR THEMSELVES. OF THE PUBLIC SPIRIT OF DAVE AND DOLLY, AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF A BARRAGE. HOW MRS. TAPPING AND MRS. RILEY HEARD THE ENGINES. OF A SHORTAGE OF MUD, AND A GREAT RESOLVE OF DAVE'S. WHY NOT SOME NEW MUD FROM THE NEW SHORE?

The interest of Dave's accident told in the last chapter is merely collateral. It shows how narrow an escape the story that follows had not only of never being finished, but even of never being written. For if its events had never happened, it goes near to certainty that they would never have been narrated. Near, but not quite. For even if Dave had profited by these warnings, cautions, and moral lessons to the extent of averting what now appears to have been Destiny, some imaginative author might have woven a history showing exactly what might have happened to him if he had not been a good boy. And that history, in the hands of a master—one who had the organ of the conditional præterpluperfect tense very large—might have worked out the same as this.

The story may be thankful that no such task has fallen to its author's lot. It is so much easier to tell something that actually did happen than to make up as you go.

Dave was soon as bad as ever—no doubt of it. Only he kept clear of that post. The burnt child dreads the fire, and the chances are that admonitions not to climb up on posts had less to do with his abstention from this one than the lesson the post itself had hammered into the back of his head. Exploration of the outer world—of the regions imperfectly known beyond that post—had so far produced no fatal consequences; so that Aunt M'riar's and Uncle Mo's warnings to the children to keep within bounds had not the same convincing character.

But a time was at hand for the passion of exploration to seize upon these two very young people, and to become an excitement as absorbing to them as the discovery of America to Paolo Toscanelli and Christopher Columbus. At first it was satisfied by the cul-de-sac recess on which Sapps Court opened. But this palled, and no wonder! How could it compete with the public highway out of which it branched, especially when there was a new shore—that is to say, sewer—in course of construction?

To stand on the edge of a chasm which certainly reached to the bowels of the earth, and to see them shovelled up from platform to platform by agencies that spat upon their hands for some professional reason whenever there came a lull in the supply from below, was to find life worth living indeed. These agencies conversed continually about an injury that had been inflicted on them by the Will of God, the selfish caprice of their employers, or the cupidity of the rich. They appeared to be capable of shovelling in any space, however narrow, almost to the extent of surrendering one dimension and occupying only a plane surface. But it hadn't come to that yet. The battens that kept the trench-sides vertical were wider apart than what you'd have thought, when you come to try 'em with a two-fut rule. And the short lengths of quartering that kep' 'em apart were not really intersecting the diggers' anatomies as the weaver's shuttle passes through the warp. That was only the impression of the unconcerned spectator as he walked above them over the plank bridge that acknowledged his right of way across the road. His sympathies remained unentangled. If people navigated, it was their own look out. You see, these people were navvies, or navigators, although it strains one's sense of language to describe them so.

The best of it was to come. For in time the lowest navvy was threatened with death by misadventure, unless he come up time enough to avoid the water. The small pump the job had been making shift with was obliged to acknowledge itself beaten, and to make way for one with two handles, each with room for two pumpers; and this in turn was discarded in favour of a noisy affair with a donkey-engine, which brought up the yellow stream as fast as ever a gutter of nine-inch plank, nailed up to a V, would carry it away. And it really was a most extraordinary thing that of all those navigators there was not one that had not predicted in detail exactly the course of events that had come about. Mr. Bloxam, the foreman, had told the governor that there would be no harm in having the pump handy, seeing they would go below the clay. And each of the others had—so they themselves said—spoken in the same sense, in some cases using a most inappropriate adjective to qualify the expected flood. Why, even Sleepy Joe had seen that! Sleepy Joe was this same foreman, and he lived in a wooden hutch on the job, called The Office.

But the watershed of any engine—whatever may be its donkey-power, and whatever that name implies—slops back where a closed spout changes suddenly to an open gutter, and sets up independent lakes and rivers. This one sent its overflow towards Sapps Court, the incline favouring its distribution along the gutter of the cul-de-sac, which lay a little lower than the main street it opened out of. Its rich, ochrous rivulets—containing no visible trace of hæmorrhage, in spite of that abuse of an adjective—were creeping slowly along the interstices of cobblestone paving that still outlived the incoming of Macadam, when Dave and Dolly Wardle ventured out of their archway to renew a survey, begun the previous day, of the fascinating excavation in the main street.

Here was an opportunity for active and useful service not to be lost. Dave immediately cast about to scrape up and collect such mud as came ready to hand, and with it began to build up an intercepting embankment to stop the foremost current, that was winding slowly, like Vesuvian lava, on the line of least resistance. Dolly followed his example, filling a garment she called her pinafore with whatever mould or débris was attainable, and bringing it with much gravity and some pride to help on the structure of the dyke. A fiction, rather felt than spoken, got in the air that Sapps Court and its inhabitants would be overwhelmed as by Noah's flood, except for the exertions of Dave and his sister. It appealed to some friends of the same age, also inhabitants of the Court, and with their assistance and sympathy it really seemed—in this fiction—that a catastrophe might be averted. You may imagine what a drove of little grubs those children looked in the course of half an hour. Not that any of them were particularly spruce to begin with.

However, there was the embankment holding back the dirty yellow water; and now the pump was running on steady-like, there didn't so much come slopping over to add to the deluge that threatened Sapps Court. The policeman—the only one supposed to exist, although in form he varied slightly—made an inquiry as to what was going on, to be beforehand with Anarchy. He said:—"What are you young customers about, taking the Company's water?" That seemed to embody an indictment without committing the accuser to particulars. But he took no active steps, and a very old man with a fur cap, and no teeth, and big bones in his cheeks, said:—"It don't make no odds to we, I take it." He was a prehistoric navvy, who had become a watchman, and was responsible for red lanterns hooked to posts on the edge of chasms to warn carts off. He was going to sleep in half a tent, soothed or otherwise by the unflagging piston of that donkey-engine, which had made up its mind to go till further notice.

The men were knocking off work, and it was getting on for time for those children to have their suppers and be put to bed. But as Aunt M'riar had some trimming to finish, and it was a very fine evening, there was no harm in leaving them alone a few minutes longer. As for any attractive influences of supper, those children never come in of theirselves, and always had to be fetched.

An early lamplighter—for this was in September, 1853—passed along the street with a ladder, dropping stars as he went. There are no lamplighters now, no real ones that run up ladders. Their ladders vanished first, leaving them with a magic wand that lighted the gas as soon as you got the tap turned; only that was ever so long, as often as not. Perhaps things are better now that lamps light themselves instinctively at the official hour of sunset. At any rate, one has the satisfaction of occasionally seeing one that won't go out, but burns on into the daylight to spite the Authorities.

They were cold stars, almost green, that this lamplighter dropped; but this was because the sun had left a flood of orange-gold behind it, enough to make the tune from "Rigoletto" an organ was playing think it was being composed in Italy again. The world was a peaceful world, because Opulence, inflated and moderate, had gone out of town: the former to its country-house, or a foreign hotel; the latter to lodgings at the seaside to bathe out of machines and prey on shrimps. The lull that reigned in and about Sapps Court was no doubt a sort of recoil or backwater from other neighbourhoods, with high salaries or real and personal estate, whose dwellings were closed and not being properly ventilated by their caretakers. It reacted on business there, every bit as much as in Oxford Street; and that was how Tapping's the tallow-chandler's—where you got tallow candles and dips, as well as composites; for in those days they still chandled tallow—didn't have a single customer in for ten whole minutes by the clock. In that interval Mrs. Tapping seized the opportunity to come out in the street and breathe the air. So did Mrs. Riley next door, and they stood conversing on the topics of the day, looking at the sunset over the roofs of the cul-de-sac this story has reference to. For Mrs. Tapping's shop was in the main road, opposite to where the embankment operations were in hand.

"Ye never will be tellin' me now, Mrs. Tapping, that ye've not hur-r-rd thim calling 'Fire!' in the sthrate behind? Fy-urr, fy-urr, fy-urr!" This is hard to write as Mrs. Riley spoke it, so great was her command of the letter r.

"Now you name it, Mrs. Riley, deny it I can't. But to the point of taking notice to bear in mind—why no! It was on my ears, but only to be let slip that minute. Small amounts and accommodations frequent, owing to reductions on quantity took, distrack attention. I was a-sayin' to my stepdaughter only the other day that hearin' is one thing and listenin' is another. And she says to me, she says, I was talking like a book, she says. Her very expression and far from respectful! So I says to her, not to be put upon, 'Lethear,' I says, 'books ain't similar all through but to seleck from, and I go accordin'....'" Mrs. Tapping, whose system was always to turn the conversation to some incident in which she had been prominent, might have developed this one further, but Mrs. Riley interrupted her with Celtic naïveté.

"D'ye mane to say, me dyurr, that ye can't hearr 'em now? Kape your tongue silent and listen!" A good, full brogue permits speech that would offend in colourless Saxon; and Mrs. Tapping made no protest, but listened. Sure enough the rousing, maddening "Fire, fire, fire, fire, fire!" was on its way at speed somewhere close at hand. It grew and lessened and died. And Mrs. Riley was triumphant. "That's a larrudge fire, shure!" said she, transposing her impression of the enthusiasm of the engine to the area of the conflagration. Cold logic perceives that an engine may be just as keen to pump on a cottage as on a palace, before it knows which. Mrs. Riley had come from Tipperary, and had brought a sympathetic imagination with her, leaving any logic she possessed behind.

A few minutes before the lamplighter passed—saying to the old watchman:—"Goin' to bed, Sam?" and on receiving the reply, "Time enough yet!" rejoining sarcastically:—"Time enough for a quart!"—the labourers at the dyke had recognised the fact that unless new material could be obtained, the pent-up waters would burst the curb and bound, rejoicing to be free, and rush headlong to the nearest drain. All the work would be lost unless a fresh supply could be obtained; the ruling fiction of a new Noachian deluge might prove a deadly reality instead of, as now, a theoretical contingency under conditions which engineering skill might avert. The Sappers and Miners who were roused from their beds to make good a dynamited embankment and block the relentless Thames did not work with a more untiring zeal to baffle a real enemy than did Dave and Dolly to keep out a fictitious one, and hypothetically save Uncle Moses and Aunt M'riar from drowning. But all efforts would be useless if there was to be a shortage of mud.

The faces of our little friends, and their little friends, were earnestness itself as they concentrated on the great work in the glow of the sunset. They had no eyes for its glories. The lamplighter even, dropping jewels as he went, passed them by unheeded. The organ interpreted Donizetti in vain. Despair seemed imminent when Dolly, who, though small, was as keen as the keenest of the diggers, came back after a special effort with no more than the merest handful of gutter-scrapings, saying with a most pathetic wail:—"I tan't det no more!"

Then it was that a great resolve took shape in the heart of Dave. It found utterance in the words:—"Oy wants some of the New Mud the Men spoyded up with their spoyds," and pointed to an ambitious scheme for securing some of the fine rich clay that lay in a tempting heap beyond the wooden bridge across the sewer-trench. The bridge that Dave had never even stood upon, much less crossed!

The daring, reckless courage of the enterprise! Dolly gasped with awe and terror. She was too small to find at a moment's notice any terms in which she could dissuade Dave from so venturesome a project. Besides, her faith in her brother amounted to superstition. Dave must know what was practicable and righteous. Was he not nearly six years old? She stood speechless and motionless, her heart in her mouth as she watched him go furtively across that awful bridge of planks and get nearer and nearer to his prize.

There were lions in his path, as there used to be in the path of knights-errant when they came near the castles of necromancers who held beautiful princesses captive—to say nothing of full-blown dragons and alluring syrens. These lions took in one case, the form of a butcher-boy, who said untruthfully:—"Now, young hobstacle, clear out o' this! Boys ain't allowed on bridges;" and in another that of Michael Ragstroar, who said, "Don't you let the Company see you carryin' off their property. They'll rip you open as soon as look at you. You'll be took afore the Beak." Dave was not yet old enough to see what a very perverted view of legal process these words contained, but his blue eyes looked mistrustfully at the speaker as he watched him pass up the street towards the Wheatsheaf, swinging a yellow jug with ridges round its neck and a full corporation. Michael had been sent to fetch the beer.

If the blue eyes had not remained fixed on that yellow jug and its bearer till both vanished through the swing-door of the Wheatsheaf—if their owner's mistrust of his informant had been strong enough to cancel the misgivings that crossed his baby mind, only a few seconds sooner, would things have gone otherwise with Dave? Would he have used that beautiful lump of clay, as big as a man of his age could carry, on the works that were to avert Noah's flood from Sapps Court? Would he and Dolly not probably have been caught at their escapade by an indignant Aunt M'riar, corrected, duly washed and fed, and sent to bed sadder and wiser babies? So few seconds might have made the whole difference.

Or, if that heap of clay had been thrown on the other side of the trench, on the pavement instead of towards the traffic—why then the children might have taken all they could carry, and Old Sam would have countenanced them, in reason, as like as not. But how little one gains by thinking what might have been! The tale is to tell, and tells that these things were not otherwise, but thus.

Uncle Moses was in the room on the right of the door, called the parlour, smoking a pipe with the old friend whose advice had probably kept him from coming on the parish.

"Aunt M'riar!" said he, tapping his pipe out on the hob, and taking care the ashes didn't get in the inflammable stove-ornament, "I don't hear them young customers outside. What's got 'em?"

"Don't you begin to fret and werrit till I tell you to it, Moses. The children's safe and not in any mischief—no more than usual. Mr. Alibone seen 'em." For although the world called this friend Affability Bob and Uncle Moses gave him his christened name, Aunt M'riar always spoke of him, quite civil-like, thus.

"You see the young nippers, Jerry?" said the old prizefighter; who always got narvous, as you might say, though scarcely alarmed, when they got out of sight and hearing; even if it was for no more time than what an egg takes.

"Jist a step beyond the archway, Mosey," said Mr. Alibone. "Paddlin' and sloppin' about with the water off o' the shore-pump. It's all clean water, Mrs. Catchpole, only for a little clay." Aunt M'riar, whose surname was an intrinsic improbability in the eyes of Public Opinion, and who was scarcely ever called by it, except by Mr. Jerry, expressed doubts. So he continued:—"You see, they're sinking for a new shore clear of the old one. So nothing's been opened into."

"Well," said Aunt M'riar, "I certainly did think the flaviour was being kep' under wonderful. But now you put it so, I understand. What I say is—if dirt, then clean dirt; and above all no chemicals!... What's that you're saying, Uncle Mo?"

"Why, I was a-thinking," said Uncle Moses, who seemed restless, "I was a-thinking, Bob, that you and me might have our pipes outside, being dry underfoot." For Uncle Moses, being gouty, was ill-shod for wet weather. He was slippered, though not lean. And though Mrs. Burr, coming in just then, added her testimony that the children were quite safe and happy, only making a great mess, Uncle Moses would not be content to remain indoors, but must needs be going out. "These here young juveniles," said he, outside in the Court, "where was it you took stock of 'em, did you say?"

"Close to hand," said Affability Bob. "One step out of the archway. There you'll find 'em, old man. Don't you fret your kidneys. They're all right. Hear the engines?"

"Whereabouts is the fire?"

"Somewhere down by Walworth. I saw the smoke, crossing Hungerford Bridge. This engine's coming down our road outside."

"I reckon she may be, by the sound. She'll be half-way to Blackfriars before we're out of this here Court. If she gets by where the road's up! Maybe she'll have to go back."

"There she stops! What's the popilation shoutin' at?" For the tramp of the engine's horses, heard plain enough on the main road, came to an end abruptly, and sounds ensued—men's shouts, women's cries—not reconcilable with the mere stoppage of a fire-engine by unexpected narrows or an irregular coal-cart.

"Couldn't say, I'm sure. They're a nizy lot in these parts." So said Uncle Moses, and walked slowly up the Court, stopping for breath half-way.

CHAPTER III

WHY THAT ENGINE STOPPED. BUT THE WHEELS HAD NOT GONE OVER DAVE. HOW PETER JACKSON CARRIED HIM AWAY TO THE HOSPITAL. OF DOLLY'S DESPAIR AT THE COLLAPSE OF THE BARRAGE, AND OF AN OLD COCK, NAMED SAM. MRS. TAPPING'S EXPERIENCES, AND HER DAUGHTER, ALETHEA. OF THE VICISSITUDES OF THE PUBLIC, AND ITS AMAZING RECUPERATIVE POWERS. HOW UNCLE MOSES AND MR. ALIBONE WENT TO THE HOSPITAL

So few seconds would have made the whole difference. But so engrossing had Dave found the contemplation of Michael Ragstroar and his yellow jug, so exciting particularly was its disappearance into the swing-door of the Wheatsheaf, that he forgot even the new mud that the men had spaded up with their spades. And these seconds slipped by never to return. Then when Michael had vanished, the little man stooped to secure his cargo. It was slippery and yet tenacious; had been detachable with difficulty from the spade that wrenched it from the virgin soil of its immemorial home, and was now difficult to carry. But Dave grappled bravely with it and turned to go back across the bridge.

A coming whirlwind, surely, in the distance of the street—somewhere now where all the gas-lamps' cold green stars are merged in one—now nearer, nearer still; and with it, bringing folk to doors and windows to see them pass, the war-cry of the men that fight the flames. Charioteers behind blood-horses bathed in foam; heads helmeted in flashing splendour; eyes all intent upon the track ahead, keen to anticipate the risks of headlong speed and warn the dilatory straggler from its path. Nearer and nearer—in a moment it will pass and take some road unknown to us, to say to fires that even now are climbing up through roof and floor, clasping each timber in a sly embrace fatal as the caress of Death itself:—"Thus far shalt thou go and no farther!" Close upon us now, to be stayed with a sudden cry—something in the path! Too late!

Too late, though the strong hand that held the reins brought back the foaming steeds upon their haunches, with startled eyes and quivering nostrils all agape. Too late, though the helmeted men on the engine's flank were down, almost before its swerve had ceased, to drag at every risk from beneath the plunging hoofs the insensible body of the child that had slipped from a clay heap by the roadside, on which it stood to gaze upon the coming wonder, and gone headlong down quite suddenly upon the open road.

You who read this, has it ever fallen to your lot to guide two swift horses at a daring speed through the narrow ways, the ill-driven vehicles, the careless crowds and frequent drunkards of the slum of a great city? If so, you have earned some right to sit in judgment on the fire-engine that ran our little friend down. But you will be the last of all men to condemn that fire-engine.

"Dead, mate?" One of the helmeted men asks this of the other as they escape from the plunging hoofs. They are used to this sort of thing—to every sort of thing.

"Insensible," says the other, who holds in his arms the rescued child, a mere scrap of dust and clay and pallor and a little blood.

A fire-engine calculates its rights to pause in fractions of a minute. The unused portion of twenty seconds the above conversation leaves, serves for a glance round in search of some claimant of the child, or a responsible police-officer to take over the case. Nothing presents itself but Mrs. Tapping, too much upset to be coherent, and not able to identify the child; Mrs. Riley, little better, but asking:—"Did the whales go overr it, thin?" The old man Sam, the watchman, is working round from his half-tent, where he sleeps in the traffic, but cannot possibly negotiate the full extent of trench and bridge for fifty seconds more. Time cannot be lavished waiting for him. The man at the reins, with seeming authority, clinches the matter.

"You stop, Peter Jackson. Hospital! Don't you let the child out of your hands before you get there. Understand?—All clear in front?" Two men, who have taken the horses' heads, to soothe their shaken nerves with slaps and suitable exclamations, now give them back to their owners, leaving them free to rear high once or twice to relieve feeling; while they themselves go back, each to his own place on the engine. A word of remonstrance from the driver about that rearing, and they are off again, the renewed fire-cry scarcely audible in the distance by the time Old Sam gets across the wooden bridge.

To him, as to a responsible person, says Peter Jackson:—"Know where he belongs?"—and to Mrs. Riley, as to one not responsible, but deserving of sympathy:—"No—the wheels haven't been over him."

"Down yonder Court, I take it. Couldn't say for sartin." So says Sam; and Mrs. Tapping discerns with pious fervour the Mercy of God in this occurrence, He not having flattened the child out on the road outright.

But Peter Jackson's question implied no intention to communicate with the little victim's family. To do so would be a clear dereliction of duty; an offence against discipline. He has his instructions, and in pursuance of them strides away to the Hospital without another word, bearing in his arms a light burden so motionless that it is hard to credit it with life. So quickly has the whole thing passed, that the drift of idlers hard on his heels is a fraction of what a couple more minutes would have made it. It will have grown before they reach the Middlesex, short as the distance is. Then a police-sergeant, who joins them half-way, will take notes and probably go to find the child's parents; while Peter Jackson, chagrined at this hitch in his day's fire-eating, will go off Walworth way at the best speed he may, after handing over his charge to an indisputable House-Surgeon.

One can picture to oneself how the whole thing might pass as it did, between the abrupt check of the engine's career, heard by Uncle Moses and his friend, and the two or three minutes later when they emerged through the archway to find Dolly in despair; not from any knowledge of the accident to Dave, for intense preoccupation and a rampart of clay had kept her in happy ignorance of it, but because the water had broken bounds and Noah's flood had come with a vengeance. Questioned as to Dave's whereabouts, she embarked on a lengthy stuttered explanation of how Dave had dode round there—pointing to the clay heap—to det some of the new mud the men had spoyded up with their spoyds. She reproduced his words, of course. Uncle Moses was trying to detect her meaning without much success, when he became aware that the old man in the fur cap who had shouted more than once, "I say, master!" was addressing him.

"Is that old cock singing out to one of we, Jerry?" said Uncle Moses. And then replied to the old cock:—"Say what you've got to say, mate! Come a bit nigher."

Thereupon Old Sam crossed the bridge, slowly, as Uncle Moses moved to meet him. "Might you happen to know anything of this little boy?" said old Sam.

Uncle Moses caught the sound of disaster in his accent, before his words came to an end. "What's the little boy?" said he. "Where have you got him?" And Dolly, startled by the strange sound in her uncle's voice, forgot Noah's flood, and stood dumb and terrified with outstretched muddy hands.

"I may be in the wrong of it, master"—thus Old Sam in his slow way, a trial to impatience—"but maybe this little maid's brother. They've took him across to the Hospital." Old Sam did not like to have to say this. He softened it as much as he could. Do you not see how? Omit the word "across," and see how relentless it makes the message. Do you ask why? Impossible to say—but it does!

Then Uncle Moses shouted out hoarsely, not like himself: "The Hospital—the Hospital—hear that, Bob! Our boy Dave in the Hospital!" and, catching his friend's arm, "Ask him—ask more!" His voice dropped and his breath caught. He was a bad subject for sudden emotions.

"Tell it out, friend—any word that comes first!" says Mr. Alibone. And then Old Sam, tongue-freed, gives the facts as known to him. He ends with:—"Th' young child could never have been there above a minute, all told, before the engine come along, and might have took no warning at twice his age for the vairy sudden coming of it." He dwells upon the shortness of the time Dave had been on the spot as though this minimised the evil. "I shouldn't care to fix the blame, for my own part," says he, shaking his head in venerable refusal of judicial functions not assigned to him so far.

"Is the child killed, man? Say what you know!" Thus Mr. Alibone brusquely. For he has caught a question Uncle Moses just found voice for:—"Killed or not?"

The old watchman is beginning slowly:—"That I would not undertake to say, sir...." when he is cut off short by Mrs. Riley, anxious to attest any pleasant thing, truly if possible; but if otherwise, anyhow!—"Kilt is it? No, shure thin! Insinsible." And then adds an absolutely gratuitous statement from sheer optimism:—"Shure, I hur-r-d thim say so mesilf, and I wouldn't mislade ye, me dyurr. Will I go and till his mother so for ye down the Court? To till her not to alarrum hersilf!"

But by this time Uncle Moses had rallied. The momentary qualm had been purely physical, connected with something that a year since had caused a medical examination of his heart with a stethoscope. He had been too great an adept in the art of rallying after knock-down blows in his youth to go off in a faint over this. He had felt queer, for all that. Still, he declined Mrs. Riley's kindly meant offer. "Maybe I'll make the best job of it myself," said he. "Thanking you very kindly all the same, ma'am!" After which he and his friend vanished back into Sapps Court, deciding as they went that it would be best to persuade Aunt M'riar to remain at home, while they themselves went to the Hospital, to learn the worst. It would never do to leave Dolly alone, or even in charge of neighbours.

Mrs. Riley's optimism lasted till Uncle Moses and Mr. Alibone disappeared, taking with them Dolly, aware of something terrible afoot; too small to understand the truth, whatever it was; panic-stricken and wailing provisionally to be even with the worst. Then, all reason for well-meaning falsehood being at an end, the Irishwoman looked facts in the face with the resolution that never flinches before the mishaps of one's fellow-man, especially when he is a total stranger.

"The power man!" said she. "He'll have sane the last of his little boy alive, only shure one hasn't the harrut to say the worrd. Throubles make thimsilves fast enough without the tilling of thim, and there'll be manes and to spare for the power payple to come to the knowledge without a worrd from you or me, Mrs. Tapping."

Then said Mrs. Tapping, on the watch for an opening through which she could thrust herself into the conversation; as a topic, you understand:—"Now there, Mrs. Riley, you name the very reason why I always stand by like, not to introduce my word. Not but that I will confess to the temptation undergone this very time to say that by God's will the child was took away from us, undeniable. Against that temptation I kep' my lips shut. Only I will say this much, and no concealment, that if my husband had been spared, being now a widow fourteen years, and heard me keep silence many a time, he might have said it again and again, like he said it a hundred times if he said it once when alive and able to it:—'Mary Ann Tapping, you do yourself no justice settin' still and list'nin', with your tongue in your mouth God gave you, and you there to use it!' And I says to Tapping, fifty times if I said it once, 'Tapping,' says I, 'you better know things twiced before you say 'em for every onced you say 'em before you know 'em.' Then Tapping, he says, was that to point at 'Lethear? And I says yes, though the girl was then young and so excusable. But she may learn better, I says, and made allowance though mistaken...." This is just as good a point for Mrs. Tapping to cease at as any other in the story. In reality Heaven only knows when she ceased.

A very miscellaneous public gathered round and formed false ideas of what had happened from misinformants. The most popular erroneous report ran towards connecting it somehow with the sewer-trench, influencing people to look down into its depths and watch for the reappearance of something supposed to be expected back. So much so that more than one inoffensive person asked the man in charge of the pumping engine—which went honourably on without a pause—whether "it" was down there. He was a morose and embittered man—had been crossed in love, perhaps—for he met all inquiries by another:—"Who are you a-speaking to?" and, on being told, added:—"Then why couldn't you say so?" Humble apology had then to be content with, "No, it ain't down there and never has been, if you ask me,"—in answer to the previous question.

Old Sam endeavoured more than once to point out that the accident need not necessarily end fatally. He invented tales of goods-trains that had passed over him early in life, and the surgical skill that had left him whole and sound. Trains were really unknown in his boyhood, but there was no one to contradict him. The public, stimulated to hopefulness, produced analogous experiences. It had had a hay-cart over it, with a harvest-home on the top, such as we see in pictures. It had had the Bangor coach over it, going down hill, and got caught in the skid. It had been under an artillery corps and field-guns at a gallop, when the Queen revoo'd the troops in Hyde Park. And look at it now! Horse-kicks and wheel-crushing really had a bracing tendency; gave the constitution tone, and seldom left any ill effects.

Only their consequences must be took in time. Well!—hadn't the child gone to the Hospital? Dissentients who endeavoured to suggest that broken bones and dislocations were unknown before the invention of surgeons, were rebuked by the citation of instances of neglected compound fractures whose crippled owners became athletes after their bones had been scientifically reset, having previously been rebroken in the largest number of places the narrator thought he could get credence for. Hope told her flattering tale very quickly, for when Dave's uncle and Jerry Alibone reappeared on their way to find the truth at the Hospital, her hearers were ready with encouragement, whether they knew anything about the matter or not. "I don't believe they do," said Uncle Moses, and Mr. Alibone replied—"Not they, bless your heart!" But it was refreshing for all that.

They met the police-sergeant on the way, coming from the Hospital to bring the report and make inquiry about the child's belongings. They credited him with superhuman insight when he addressed them with:—"Either of you the father of a child knocked down by Fire-engine 67A in this street—taken into accident ward?" He spoke just as though Engine 68B had knocked another child down in the next street, and so on all over London.

But his sharpness was merely human. For scarcely a soul had passed but paused to look round after them, wondering at the set jaw and pallid face of the huge man who limped on a stick, seeming put to it to keep the speed. Uncle Moses, you see, was a fine man in his own way of the prizefighter type; and now, in his old age, worked out a little like Dr. Samuel Johnson.

The report, as originally received by the police-officer, was that the child was not killed but still unconscious. A good string of injuries were credited to the poor little man, including a dislocated femur and concussion of the brain. Quite enough, alone!—for the patient, his friends and relations. The House-Surgeon, speaking professionally, spoke also hopefully of undetected complications in the background. We might pull him through for all that. This report was materially softened for the child's family. Better not say too much to the parents at present, either way!

CHAPTER IV

HOW UNCLE MO AND HIS FRIEND COULD NOT GET MUCH ENCOURAGEMENT. DOLLY'S ATTITUDE. ACHILLES AND THE TORTOISE, AND DOLLY'S PUDDING. HOW UNCLE MO'S SPIRITS WENT DOWN INTO HIS BOOTS. HOW PETER JACKSON THE FIREMAN INTERVIEWED MICHAEL RAGSTROAR, UPSIDE DOWN, AND BROUGHT AUNT M'RIAR'S HEART INTO HER MOUTH. HOW DAVE CAME HOME IN A CAB, AND MICHAEL RAGSTROAR GOT A RIDE FOR NOTHING. OF SISTER NORA, WHO GOT ON THE COURT'S VISITING LIST BEFORE IT CAME OUT THAT SHE WAS MIXED UP WITH ARISTOCRATS

The present writer, half a century since—he was then neither we nor a writer—trod upon a tiny sapling in the garden of the house then occupied by his kith and kin. It was broken off an inch from the ground, and he distinctly remembers living a disgraced life thereafter because of the beautiful tree that sapling might have become but for his inconsiderate awkwardness. If the censorious spirit that he aroused could have foreseen the tree that was to grow from the forgotten residuum of the accident, the root that it left in the ground, it would not perhaps have passed such a sweeping judgment. Any chance wayfarer in St. John's Wood may see that tree now—from the end of the street, for that matter.

So perhaps the old prizefighter might have mustered more hope in response to Aunt M'riar's plucky rally against despair. The tiny, white, motionless figure on the bed in the accident ward, that had uttered no sound since he saw it on first arriving at the Hospital, might have been destined to become that of a young engineer on a Dreadnought, or an unfledged dragoon, for any authenticated standard of Impossibility.

The House-Surgeon and his Senior, one of the heads of the Institution,—interviewed by Uncle Moses and Aunt M'riar when they came late by special permission and appointment, hoping to hear the child's voice once more, and found him still insensible and white—testified that the action of the heart was good. The little man had no intention of dying if he could live. But both his medical attendants knew that the tremulous inquiry whether there was any hope of a recovery—within a reasonable time understood, of course—was really a petition for a favourable verdict at any cost. And they could not give one, for all they would have been glad to do so. They have to damn so many hopes in a day's work, these Accident Warders!

"It's no use asking us," said they, somehow conjointly. "There's not a surgeon in all England that could tell you whether it will be life or death. We can only say the patient is making a good fight for it." They seemed very much interested in the case, though, and in the queer old broken-hearted giant that sobbed over the half-killed baby that could not hear nor answer, speak to it as he might.

"What did you say your name was?" said the Senior Surgeon to Uncle Moses.

"Moses Wardle of Hanley, called the Linnet. Ye see, I was a Member of the Prize Ring, many years. Fighting Man, you might say."

"I had an idea I knew the name, too. When I was a youngster thirty odd years ago I took an interest in that sort of thing. You fought Bob Brettle, and the umpires couldn't agree."

"That was it, master. Well, I had many a turn up—turn up and turn down, either way as might be. But I had a good name. I never sold a backer. I did my best by them that put their money on me." For the moneychanger, the wagermonger, creeps in and degrades the noble science of damaging one's fellow-man effectively; even as in old years he brought discredit on cock-fighting, in which at least—you cannot deny it—the bird cuts a better figure than he does in his native farmyard.

"Come round after twelve to-morrow, and we may know more," said the House-Surgeon. "It's not regular—but ask for me." And then the older Surgeon shook Uncle Moses by the hand, quite respectful-like—so Mr. Jerry said to Aunt M'riar later—and the two went back, sad and discouraged, to Sapps Court.

What made it all harder to bear was the difficulty of dealing with Dolly. Dolly knew, of course, that Dave had been took to the Horsetickle—that was the nearest she could get to the word, after frequent repetitions—and that he was to be made well, humanly speaking, past a doubt. The little maid had to be content with assurances to this effect, inserting into the treaty a stipulation as to time.

"Dave's doin' to tum home after dinner," said she, when that meal seemed near at hand. And Uncle Moses never had the heart to say no.

Then when no Dave had come, and Dolly had wept for him in vain, and a cloth laid announced supper, Dolly said—moved only by that landmark of passing time—"Dave is a-doin' to tum home after supper; he is a-doin', Uncle Mo, he is a-doin'!" And what could her aunt and uncle do but renew the bill, as it were; the promise to pay that could only be fulfilled by the production of Dave, whole and sound.

She refused food except on condition that an exactly similar helping should be conveyed to Dave in the Horsetickle. She withdrew the condition that Uncle Moses and herself should forthwith convey Dave's share of the repast to him, in consideration of a verbal guarantee that little girls were not allowed in such Institutions. Why she accepted this so readily is a mystery. Possibly the common form of instruction to little girls, dwelling on their exclusion by statute or usage from advantages enjoyed by little boys, may have had its weight. Little girls, exempli gratia, may not lie on their backs and kick their legs up. Little boys are at liberty to do so, subject to unimportant reservations, limiting the area at their disposal for the practice. It is needless—and might be thought indelicate—to instance the numerous expressions that no little girl should use under any circumstances, which are regarded as venial sin in little boys, except of course on Sunday. Society does not absolutely countenance the practices of spitting and sniffing in little boys, but it closes its eyes and passes hypocritically by on the other side of the road; while, on the other hand, little girls indulging in these vices would either be cast out into the wilderness, or have to accept the rôle of penitent Magdalens. Therefore when Dolly was told that little girls were not allowed in Hospitals, it may only have presented itself to her as another item in a code of limitations already familiar.

The adhibition in visible form of a pendant to her own allowance of pudding or bread-and-milk, to be carried to the Horsetickle by Uncle Moses on his next visit, had a sedative effect, and she was contented with it, without insisting on seeing the pledge carried out. Her imagination was satisfied, as a child's usually is, with any objective transaction. Moreover, a dexterous manipulation of the position improved matters. The portion allotted to Dave was removed, ostensibly to keep it warm for him, but reproduced to do duty as a second helping for Dolly. Of course, it had to be halved again for Dave's sake, and an ancient puzzle solved itself in practice. The third halving was not worth sending to the Hospital. Even so a step too small to take was left for Achilles when the tortoise had only just started. "Solvitur ambulando," said Philosophy, and a priori reasoning took a back place.

Her constant inquiries about the date of Dave's cure and return were an added and grievous pain to her aunt and uncle. It was easy for the moment to procrastinate, but how if the time should come for telling her that Dave would never come back—no, never?

But the time was not to come yet. For a few days Life showed indecision, and Uncle Mo and Aunt M'riar had a thumping heart apiece each time they stood by the little, still, white figure on the bed and thought the breath was surely gone. They were allowed in the ward every day, contrary to visitor-rule, apparently because of Uncle Mo's professional eminence in years gone by—an odd reason when one thinks of it! It was along of that good gentleman, God bless him!—said Aunt M'riar—that knew Uncle Mo's name in the Ring. In fact, the good gentleman had said to the House-Surgeon in private converse: "You see, there's no doubt the old chap ended sixteen rounds with Brettle in a draw, and Jem Mace had a near touch with Brettle. No, no—we must let him see the case day by day." So Uncle Mo saw the case each day, and each day went away to transact such business with Hope as might be practicable. And each day, on his return, there was a voice heard in Sapps Court, Dolly weeping for her elder brother, and would not be comforted. "Oo did said oo would fess Dave back from the Horsetickle, oo know oo did, Uncle Mo"; and similar reproaches, mixed themselves with her sobs. But for many days she got no consolation beyond assurance that Dave would come to-morrow, discharged cured.

Then, one windy morning, a punctual equinoctial gale, gathering up its energies to keep inoffensive persons awake all night and, if possible, knock some chimney-stacks down, blew Uncle Mo's pipelight out, and caused him to make use of an expression. And Aunt M'riar reproved that expression, saying:—"Not with that blessed boy lying there in the Hospital should you say such language, Moses, more like profane swearing, I call it, than a Christian household."

"He's an old Heathen, ma'am, is Moses," said Mr. Alibone, who was succeeding in lighting his own pipe, in spite of the wind in at the street door. Because, as we have seen, in this Court—unlike the Courts of Law or Her Majesty's Court of St. James's—the kitchens opened right on the street. Not but what, for all that, there was the number where you would expect, on a shiny boss you could rub clean and give an appearance. Aunt M'riar said so, and must have known.

Uncle Moses shook his head gravely over his own delinquency, as if he truly felt it just as much as anybody. But when he got his pipe lighted, instead of being cheerful and making the most of what the doctor had said that very day, his spirits went down into his boots, which was a way they had.

"'Tain't any good to make believe," said he. "Supposin' our boy never comes back, M'riar!"

"There, now!" said Aunt M'riar. "To hear you talk, Mo, wouldn't anybody think! And after what Dr. Prime said only this afternoon! I should be ashamed."

"What was it Dr. Prime said, Mo?" asked Mr. Alibone, quite cheerful-like. "Tell us again, old man." For you see, Uncle Moses he'd brought back quite an encouraging report, whatever anyone see fit to say, when he come back from the Hospital. Dr. Prime was the House-Surgeon.

"I don't take much account of him," said Uncle Mo. "A well-meanin' man, but too easy by half. One o' your good-natured beggars. Says a thing to stuff you up like! For all I could see, my boy was as white as that bit of trimmin' in your hand, M'riar."

"But won't you tell us what the doctor said, Mo?" said Mr. Alibone. "I haven't above half heard the evening's noose." He'd just come in to put a little heart into Moses.

"Said the little child had a better colour. But I don't set any store by that." And then what does Uncle Moses do but reg'lar give away and go off sobbing like a baby. "Oh, M'riar, M'riar, we shall never have our boy back—no, never!"

And then Aunt M'riar, who was a good woman if ever Mr. Alibone come across one—this is what that gentleman could and did tell a friend after, incorporated verbatim in the text—she up and she says:—"For shame of yourself, Mo, for to go and forget yourself like that before Mr. Alibone! I tell you I believe we shall have the boy back in a week, all along o' what Dr. Prime said." On which, and a further representation that he would wake Dolly if he went on like that, Uncle Mo he pulled himself together and smoked quiet. Whereupon Aunt M'riar dwelt upon the depressing effect a high wind in autumn has on the spirits, with the singular result referred to above, of their retractation into their owner's boots, like quicksilver in a thermometer discouraged by the cold. After which professional experience was allowed some weight, and calmer counsels prevailed.

About this time an individual in a sort of undress uniform, beginning at the top in an equivocal Tam-o'-Shanter hat, sauntered into the cul-de-sac to which Sapps Court was an appendix. He appeared to be unconcerned in human affairs, and indeed independent of Time, Space, and Circumstance. He addressed a creature that was hanging upside down on some railings, apparently by choice.

"What sort of a name does this here archway go by?" said he, without acute curiosity.

"That's Sappses Court," said the creature, remaining inverted. "Say it ain't?" He appeared to identify the uniform he was addressing, and added:—"There ain't a fire down that Court, 'cos I knows and I'm a telling of yer. You'd best hook it." The uniform hooked nothing. Then, in spite of the creature—who proved, right-side-up, to be Michael Ragstroar—shouting after him—"You ain't wanted down that Court!" he entered it deliberately, whistling a song then popular, whose singer wished he was with Nancy, he did, he did, in a second floor, with a small back-door, to live and die with Nancy.

Having identified Sapps, he seemed to know quite well which house he wanted, for he went straight to the end and knocked at No. 7.

"Sakes alive!" said Aunt M'riar, responsive to the knock. "There's no fire here."

"I'm off duty," said the fireman briefly. "I've come to tell you about your young customer at the Hospital."

Aunt M'riar behaved heroically. There was only, to her thinking, one chance in ten that this strange, inexplicable messenger should have brought any other news to their house than that of its darling's death; but that one chance was enough to make her choke back a scream, lest Uncle Mo should have one moment of needless despair. And else—it shot across her mind in a second—might not a sudden escape from despair even be fatal to that weak heart of his? So Aunt M'riar pulled to the door behind her to say, with an effort:—"Is he dead?" The universe swam about outside while she stood still, and something hummed in her head. But through it she heard the fireman say:—"Not he!" as of one endowed with a great vitality, one who would take a deal of killing. When he added:—"He's spoke," though she believed her ears certainly, for she ran back into the kitchen crying out:—"He's spoke, Mo, he's spoke!" she did it with a misgiving that the only interpretation she could see her way to must be wrong—was altogether too good to be true.

Uncle Mo fairly shouted with joy, and this time woke Dolly, who thought it was a calamity, and wept. Fully five minutes of incoherent rejoicing followed, and then details might be rounded off. The fireman had to stand by his engine on the night-shift in an hour's time, but he saw his way to a pipe, and lit it.

"They're always interested to hear the ending-up of things at the Station," said he, to account for himself and his presence, "and I made it convenient to call round at the Ward. The party that took the child from me happened to be there, and knew me again." He, of course—but you would guess this—was Peter Jackson of Engine 67A. He continued:—"The party was so obliging as to take me into the Ward to the bedside. And it was while I was there the little chap began talking. The party asked me to step in and mention it to you, ma'am, or his uncle, seeing it was in my road to the Station." Then Peter Jackson seemed to feel his words needed extenuation or revision. "Not but I would have gone a bit out of the way, for that matter!" said he.

"'Twouldn't be any use my looking round now, I suppose?" said Uncle Mo. Because he always was that restless and fidgety.

"Wait till to-morrow, they said, the party and the nurse. By reason the child might talk a bit and then get some healthy sleep. What he's had these few days latterly don't seem to count." Thus Peter Jackson, and Uncle Moses said he had seen the like. And then all three of them made the place smokier and smokier you could hardly make out across the room.

"Mo's an impatient old cock, you see!" said Mr. Alibone, who seemed to understand Peter Jackson, and vice versa. And Uncle Mo said:—"I suppose I shall have to mark time." To which the others replied that was about it.

"Only whatever did the young child say, mister?" said Aunt M'riar; like a woman's curiosity, to know. But those other two, they was curious underneath-like; only denied it.

"I couldn't charge my memory for certain, ma'am," said Peter Jackson, "and might very easy be wrong." He appeared to shrink from the responsibility of making a report, but all his hearers were agreed that there was no call to cut things so very fine as all that. A rough outline would meet the case.

"If it ran to nonsense in a child," said Uncle Mo—"after all, what odds?" And Aunt M'riar said:—"Meanin' slips through the words sometimes, and no fault to find." She had not read "Rabbi Ben Ezra," so this was original.

Peter Jackson endeavoured to charge his memory, or perhaps more properly, to discharge it. Dave had said first thing when he opened his eyes:—"The worty will be all over the hedge. Let me go to stop the worty." Of course, this had been quite unintelligible to his hearers. However, Mr. Alibone and Uncle Mo were au fait enough of the engineering scheme that had led to the accident, to supply the explanation. Dave's responsibility as head engineer had been on his conscience all through his spell of insensibility, and had been the earliest roused matter of thought when the light began to break.

Besides, it so chanced that testimony was forthcoming to support this view and confirm Dave's sanity. Dolly, who had been awakened by the noise, had heard enough to convey to her small mind that something pleasant had transpired in relation to Dave. Though young, she had a certain decision of character. Her behaviour was lawless, but not unnatural. She climbed out of her wooden crib in Aunt M'riar's bedroom, and slipping furtively down the stair which led direct to the kitchen, succeeded in bounding on to the lap of her uncle; from which, once established, she knew it would be difficult for her aunt to dislodge her. She crowed with delight at the success of this escapade, and had the satisfaction of being, as it were, confirmed in her delinquency by her aunt wrapping a shawl round her. This was partly on the score of the cold draughts in such a high wind, partly as a measure of public decency. She was in time to endorse her uncle's explanation of Dave's speech intelligibly enough, with a due allowance of interpretation.

Closely reported, the substance of her commentary ran as follows—"Dave tooktited the mud when I fessed him the mud in my flock"—this was illustrated in a way that threatened to outrage a sensitive propriety, the speaker's aunt's—"and spooshed up the worty and spooshed up the worty"—this repetition had great value—"and spooshtited the worty back, and then there wasn't no more mud ... it was all fessed away in my flock.... All dorn!—ass, it was—all dorn!"—this was in a minor key, and thrilled with pathos—"and Dave dode to fess more where the new mud was, and was took to the Horsetickle and never come back no more...." At this point it seemed best to lay stress upon the probable return of Dave, much to Dolly's satisfaction; though she would have been better pleased if a date had been fixed.

Our own belief is that Dolly thought the Horsetickle was an institution for the relief of sufferers from accidents occasioned by horses, and that no subsequent experience ever entirely dissipated this impression. The chances are that nine or ten of the small people one sees daily and thinks of as "the children," are laying up, even at this moment, some similar fancy that will last a lifetime. But this is neither here nor there.

What is more to the purpose is that a fortnight later Dave was brought home in a cab—the only cab that is recorded in History as having ever deliberately stood at the entrance to Sapps Court, with intent. Cabs may have stood there in connection with other doorways in the cul-de-sac, but ignoring proudly the archway with the iron post. Dave was carried down the Court by his uncle with great joy, and Michael Ragstroar seized the opportunity to tie himself somehow round the axle of the cab's backwheels, and get driven some distance free of charge.

Dave, as seen by Dolly on his return, was still painfully white, and could not walk. And Dolly might not come banging and smashing down on him like a little elephant, because it would hurt him; so she had to be good. The elephant simile was due to a lady—no doubt well-meaning—who accompanied Dave from the Hospital, and came more than once to see him afterwards. But it was taking a good deal on herself to decide what Dolly ought or ought not to do to Dave.

In those days slumming proper had not set in, and the East End was only known geographically, except, no doubt, to a few enthusiasts—the sort that antedates first discovery after the fact, and takes a vicious pleasure in precursing its successors. But unassuming benefactresses occurred at intervals whom outsiders knew broadly as Sisters of Charity. Such a one was this lady, between whom and Aunt M'riar a sympathetic friendship grew up before the latter discovered that Dave's hospital friend was an Earl's niece, which not unnaturally made her rather standoffish for a time. However, a remark of Mr. Alibone's—who seemed to know—that the lady's uncle was a belted Earl, and no mistake, palliated the Earldom and abated class prejudice. The Earl naturally went up in the esteem of the old prizefighter when it transpired that he was belted. What more could the most exacting ask?

But it was in the days when this lady was only "that party from the Hospital," that she took root at No. 7, Sapps Court. No. 7 was content that she should remain nameless; but when she said, in some affair of a message to be given at the Hospital, that its bearer was to ask for Sister Nora, it became impossible to ignore the name, although certainly it was a name that complicated matters. She remained, however, plain Sister Nora, without suspicion of any doubtful connections, until a scheme of a daring character took form—nothing less than that Dave should be taken into the country for change of air.

Uncle Mo was uneasy at the idea of Dave going away. Besides, he had always cherished the idea that the air of Sapps Court was equal to that of San Moritz, for instance. Look at what it was only a few years before Dave's father and mother first moved in, when it was all fields along the New Road—which has since been absurdly named Euston and Marylebone Road! Nothing ever come to change the air in Sapps Court that Uncle Mo knew of. And look at the wallflowers growing out in front the same as ever!

Uncle Mo, however, was not the man to allow his old-fashioned prejudices to stand in the way of the patient's convalescence, and an arrangement was made by Sister Nora that Dave should be taken charge of, for a while, by an old and trustworthy inhabitant of the Rocestershire village of which her uncle, the belted Earl, was the feudal lord and master, or slave and servant, according as you look at it. It was during the arrangement of this plan that his Earldom leaked out, creating serious misgivings in the minds of Uncle Mo and Aunt M'riar that they would be ill-advised if they allowed themselves to get mixed up with that sort of people.

CHAPTER V

OF DOLLY'S CRACKNELL BISCUIT, THAT SHE MISTOOK FOR DAVE. OF HER UNSEAWORTHY BOX, AND HER VISITS TO MRS. PRICHARD UPSTAIRS. HOW SHE HAD NEVER TOLD MRS. BURR A WORD ABOUT VAN DIEMEN'S LAND. CONCERNING IDOLATRY, AND THE LIABILITY OF TRYING ON TO TEMPER. UNCLE MO'S IDEAS OF PENAL SETTLEMENTS

They were sad days in Sapps Court after Sister Nora bore Dave away to Chorlton-under-Bradbury; particularly for Dolly, whose tears bathed her pillow at night, and diluted her bread-and-milk in the morning. There was something very touching about this little maid's weeping in her sleep, causing Aunt M'riar to give her a cracknell biscuit—to consume if possible; to hold in her sleeping hand as a rapture of possession, anyhow. Dolly accepted it, and contrived to enjoy it slowly without waking. What is more, she stopped crying; and my belief is, if you ask me, that sleep having deprived her of the power of drawing fine distinctions, she mistook this biscuit for Dave. Its caput mortuum was still clasped to her bosom when, deep unconsciousness merging all distinctions in unqualified existence, she was having her sleep out next day.

Dolly may have felt indignant and hurt at the audacious false promises of her uncle and aunt as to Dave's return. He had come home, certainly, but badly damaged. It was a sad disappointment; the little woman's first experience of perfidy. Her betrayers made a very poor show of their attempts at compensation—toys and suchlike. There was a great dignity in Dolly's attitude towards these contemptible offerings of a penitent conscience. She accepted them, certainly, but put them away in her bots to keep for Dave. Her box—if one has to spell it right—was an overgrown cardboard box with "Silk Twill" written on one end, and blue paper doors to fold over inside. It had been used as a boat, but condemned as unseaworthy as soon as Dolly could not sit in it to be pushed about, the gunwale having split open amidships. Let us hope this is right, nautically.

Considered as a safe for the storage of valuables, Dolly's box would have acquitted itself better if fair play had been shown to it. Its lid should have been left on long enough to produce an impression, and not pulled off at frequent intervals to exhibit its contents. No sooner was an addition made to these than Dolly would say, for instance, that she must s'ow Mrs. Picture upstairs the most recent acquisitions. Then she would insist on trying to carry it upstairs, but was not long enough in the arms, and Aunt M'riar had to do it for her in the end. Not, however, unwillingly, because it enabled her to give her mind to pinking or gauffering, or whatever other craft was then engaging her attention. We do not ourself know what pinking is, or gauffering; we have only heard them referred to. A vague impression haunts us that they fray out if not done careful. But this is probably valueless.

No doubt Dolly's visits upstairs in connection with this box were answerable for Aunt M'riar's having come to know a good deal about old Mrs. Prichard's—or, according to Dave and Dolly, Picture's—antecedents. A good deal, that is, when it came to be put together and liberally helped by inferences; but made up of very small deals—disjointed deals—in the form in which they were received by Aunt M'riar. As, for instance, on the occasion just referred to, shortly after Dave had gone on a visit to the tenant of the belted Earl, Uncle Mo having gone away for an hour, to spend it in the parlour of The Rising Sun, a truly respectable house where there were Skittles, and Knurr and Spell. He might, you see, be more than an hour: there was no saying for certain.

"I do take it most kind of you, ma'am," said Aunt M'riar for the fiftieth time, with departure in sight, "to keep an eye on the child. Some children nourishes a kind of ap'thy, not due to themselves, but constitutional in their systems, and one can leave alone without fear by reason of it. But Dolly is that busy and attentive, and will be up and doing, so one may easy spoil a tuck or stand down an iron too hot if called away sudden to see after the child."

The old woman seemed to Aunt M'riar to respond vaguely. She loved to have the little thing anigh her, and hear her clacket. "All my own family are dead and gone, barring one son," said she. And then added, without any consciousness of jarring ideas:—"He would be forty-five." Aunt M'riar tried in vain to think of some way of sympathizing, but was relieved from her self-imposed duty by the speaker continuing—"He was my youngest. Born at Macquarie Harbour in the old days. The boy was born up-country—yes, forty-five years agone."

"Not in England now, ma'am, I suppose," said Aunt M'riar, who could not see her way to anything else. The thought crossed her mind that, so far as she knew, no male visitor for the old tenant of the attics had so far entered the house.

The old woman shook her head slowly. "I could not say," she said. "I cannot tell you now if he be alive or dead." Then she became drowsy, as old age does when it has talked enough; so, as Aunt M'riar had plenty to see to, she took her leave, Dolly remaining in charge as per contract.

Aunt M'riar passed on these stray fragments of old Mrs. Prichard's autobiography to Uncle Mo when he came in from The Rising Sun. The old boy seemed roused to interest by the mention of Van Diemen's Land. "I call to mind," said he, "when I was a youngster, hearing tell of the convicts out in those parts, and how no decent man could live in the place. Hell on Earth, they did say, those that knew." Thereupon old Mrs. Prichard straightway became a problem to Aunt M'riar. If there were none but convicts in Van Diemen's Land, and all Mrs. Prichard's boys were born there, the only chance of the old woman not having been the mother of a convict's children lay in her having been possibly the wife of a gaoler, at the best. And yet—she was such a nice, pretty old thing! Was it conceivable?

Then in subsequent similar interviews Aunt M'riar, inquisitive-like, tried to get further information. But very little was forthcoming beyond the fact that Mrs. Prichard's husband was dead. What supported the convict theory was that his widow never referred to any relatives of his or her own. Mrs. Burr, her companion or concomitant—or at least fellow-lodger—was not uncommunicative, but knew "less than you might expect" about her. Aunt M'riar cultivated this good woman with an eye to information, holding her up—as the phrase is now—at the stairfoot and inveigling her to tea and gossip. She was a garrulous party when you come to know her, was Mrs. Burr; and indeed, short of intimacy, she might have produced the same impression on any person well within hearing.

"Times and again," said she in the course of one such conversation, which had turned on the mystery of Mrs. Prichard's antecedents, "have I thought she was going to let on about her belongings, and never so much as a word! Times and again have I felt my tongue in the roof of my mouth, for curiosity to think what she would say next. And there, will you believe me, missis?—it was no better than so much silence all said and done! Nor it wasn't for want of words, like one sits meanin' a great deal and when it comes to the describin' of it just nowhere! She was by way of keeping something back, and there was I sat waiting for it, and guess-working round like, speculating, you might say, to think what it might be when it come. Thank you, ma'am—not another cup!"

"There's more in the pot, ma'am," said Aunt M'riar, looking into it to see, near the paraffin lamp which smelt: they all did in those days. But Mrs. Burr had had three; and three does, mostly. If these excellent women's little inflections of speech, introduced thus casually, are puzzling, please supply inverted commas. Aunt M'riar organized the tea-tray to take away and wash up at the sink, after emptying saucer-superfluities into the slop-basin. Mrs. Burr referred to the advantages we enjoy as compared with our forbears, instancing especially our exemption from the worship of wooden images, Egyptian Idles—a spelling accommodated to meet an impression Mrs. Burr had derived from a Japanese Buddha—and suchlike, and Tea.

"However they did without it I cannot think," said she. "On'y, of course, not having to stitch, stitch, stitch from half-past six in the morning till bedtime made a difference." Her ideas of our ancestors were strongly affected by a copper-plate engraving in a print-shop window in Soho, even as idolatry had been presented to her by a Tea-Man and Grocer in Tottenham Court Road. It was Stothard's "Canterbury Pilgrims"—you know!—and consequently her moyen age had a falcon on its wrist, and a jester in attendance, invariably. "They was a good deal in the open air, and it tells," was her tribute to the memory of this plate. She developed the subject further, incidentally. "Tryin' on is a change, of course, but liable to temper, and vexatious when the party insists on letting out and no allowance of turn-over. The same if too short in front. What was I a-sayin'?... Oh, Mrs. Prichard—yes! You was inquiring, ma'am, about the length of time I had known her. Just four years this Christmas, now I think of it. Time enough and to spare to tell anything she liked—if she'd have liked. But you may take it from me, ma'am, on'y to go no further on any account, that Mrs. Prichard is not, as they say, free-spoke about her family, but on the contrary the contrairy." Mrs. Burr was unconsciously extending the powers of the English tongue, in varying one word's force by different accents.

Uncle Moses he cut in, being at home that time:—"Was you saying, ma'am, that the old widder-lady's husband had been a convict in Australia?"

Oh no!—Mrs. Burr had never got that far. So she testified. Aunt M'riar, speaking from the sink, where she was extracting out the tea-leaves from the pot, was for calling Uncle Moses over the coals. Anybody might soon be afraid to say anything, to have been running away with an idea like that. No one had ever said any such a thing. Indeed, the convict was entirely inferential, and had no foundation except in the fact that the old woman's son had been born at Macquarie Harbour. Uncle Mo's impression that Van Diemen's Land was a sort of plague-spot on the planet—the bacilli of the plague being convicted criminals—was no doubt too well grounded. But it was only a hearsay of youth, and even elderly men may now fail to grasp the way folk spoke and thought of those remote horrors, the Penal Settlements, in the early days of last century—a century with whose years those of Uncle Moses, after babyhood, ran nearly neck and neck. That fellow-creatures, turned t'other way up, were in Hell at the Antipodes, and that it was so far off it didn't matter—that was the way the thing presented itself, and supplied the excuse for forgetting all about it. Uncle Mo had "heard tell" of their existence; but then they belonged to the criminal classes, and he didn't. If people belonged to the criminal classes it was their own look out, and they must take the consequences.

So that when the old boy referred to this inferential convict as a presumptive fact, the meaning of his own words had little force for himself. Even if the old lady's husband had been a convicted felon, it was now long enough ago to enable him to think of him as he thought of the chain-gangs eight thousand miles off as the crow flies—or would fly if he could go straight; the nearest way round mounts up to twelve. Anyhow, there was no more in the story than would clothe the widowhood of the upstairs tenant with a dramatic interest.

So, as it appeared that Mrs. Prichard's few words to Aunt M'riar were more illuminating than anything Mrs. Burr had to tell, and they really amounted to very little when all was said and done, there was at least nothing in the convict story to cause misgivings of the fitness of the upstairs attic to supply a haven of security for Dolly, while her aunt went out foraging for provisions; or when, as we have seen sometimes happened, Dolly became troublesome from want of change, and kep' up a continual fidget for this or that, distrackin' your—that is, Aunt M'riar's—attention.

CHAPTER VI

PHOEBE AND THE SQUIRE'S SON. HER RUNAWAY MARRIAGE WITH HIM. HOW HE DABBLED IN FORGERY AND BURNED HIS FINGERS. OF A JUDGE WHO TOOK AFTER THE PSALMIST. VAN DIEMEN'S LAND, AND HOW PHOEBE GOT OUT THERE. HOW BOTH TWINS WERE PROVED DEAD BY IRRESISTIBLE EVIDENCE, EACH TO EACH. HOW THORNTON FORGOT THAT PHOEBE COULD NEVER BE LEGALLY HIS WIDOW. HOW HIS SON ACTED WELL UP TO HIS FATHER'S STANDARD OF IMMORALITY. MARRIAGE A MEANS TO AN END, BUT ONLY ONCE. AN ILL-STARRED BURGLARY. NORFOLK ISLAND. WHY BOTH MRS. DAVERILLS CHANGED THEIR NAMES

If this story should ever be retold by a skilful teller, his power of consecutive narrative and redisposition of crude facts in a better order will be sure to add an interest it can scarcely command in its present form. But it is best to make no pretence to niceties of construction, when a mere presentation of events is the object in view. The following circumstances in the life of old Mrs. Prichard constitute a case in point. The story might, so to speak, ask its reader's forgiveness for so sudden a break into the narrative. Consider that it has done so, and amend the tale should you ever retell it.

Maisie Runciman, born in the seventies of the previous century, and close upon eighty years of age at the time of this story, was the daughter of an Essex miller, who became a widower when she and her twin sister Phoebe were still quite children. His only other child, a son many years their senior, died not long after his mother, leaving them to the sole companionship of their father. He seems to have been a quarrelsome man, who had estranged himself from both his wife's relatives and his own. He also had that most unfortunate quality of holding his head high, as it is called; so high, in fact, that his twin girls found it difficult to associate with their village neighbours, and were driven back very much on their own resources for society. Their father's morose isolation was of his own choosing. He was, however, affectionate in a rough way to them, and their small household was peaceful and contented enough. The sisters, wrapped up in one another, as twins so often are, had no experience of any other condition of life, and thought it all right and the thing that should be.

All went well enough—without discord anyhow, however monotonously—until Maisie and Phoebe began to look a little like women; which happened, to say the truth, at least a year before their father consented to recognise the fact, and permit them to appear in the robes of maturity. About that time the young males of the neighbourhood became aware, each in his private heart, of an adoration cherished for one or other of the beautiful twins from early boyhood. Would-be lovers began to buzz about like flies when fruit ripens. If any one of these youths had any doubt about the intensity and immutability of his passion, it vanished when the girls announced official womanhood by appearing at church in the costume of their seniors. Some students of the mysterious phenomena of Love have held that man is the slave of millinery, and that women are to all intents and purposes their skirts. It is too delicate a question for hurried discussion in a narrative which is neither speculative nor philosophical, but historical. All that concerns its writer is that no sooner did the costume of the miller's daughters suggest that they would be eligible for the altar, than they grew so dear, so dear, that everything masculine and unattached was ambitious to be the jewel that trembled at their ear, or the girdle about their dainty, dainty waist.

The worst of it for these girls was that their likeness to one another outwent that of ordinary twinship. It resembled that of the stage where the same actor personates both Dromios; and their life was one perpetual Comedy of Errors. Current jest said that they themselves did not know which was which. But they did know, perfectly well, and had no misgivings whatever about becoming permanently confused; even when, having been dressed in different colours to facilitate distinction, they changed dresses and produced a climax of complication. Even this was not so bad as when Phoebe had a tiff with Maisie—a rare thing between twins—and Maisie avenged herself by pretending to be Phoebe, affecting that all the latter's protests of identity were malicious misrepresentation. Who could decide when they themselves were not of a tale? What settled the matter in the end was that Phoebe cried bitterly at being misrepresented, while Maisie was so ill-advised as not to do the same, and even made some parade of triumph. "Yow are Maisie. I heerd yow a-crowun'," said an old stone-dresser, who, with other mill-hands, was referred to for an opinion.

This was when they were quite young, before slight variations of experience had altered appearance and character to the point of making them distinguishable when seen side by side. Not, however, to the point of rendering impossible a trick each had played more than once on too importunate male acquaintances. What could be more disconcerting to the protestations of a rustic admirer than "Happen you fancy you are speaking to my sister Phoebe, sir?" from Maisie, or vice versa? It was absolutely impossible to nail either of these girls to her own identity, in the face of her denial of it in her sister's absence. Perhaps the only real confidence on the point that ever existed was their mother's, who knew the two babies apart—so she said—because one smelt of roses, the other of marjoram.

It may easily have been that the power of duping youth and shrewdness, as to which sister she really was, weighed too heavily with each of these girls in their assessment of the value of lovers' vows. And still more easily that—some three years later than the girlish jest related a page since—when Maisie, playing off this trick on a wild young son of the Squire's, was met by an indignant reproach for her attempted deception, she should have been touched by his earnestness and seeming insight into her inner soul, and that the incident should have become the cornerstone of a fatal passion for a damned scoundrel. "Oh, Maisie—Maisie!"—thus ran his protestation—"Dearest, best, sweetest of girls, how can you think to dupe me when your voice goes to my heart as no other voice ever can—ever will? How, when I know you for mine—mine alone—by touch, by sight, by hearing?" The poor child's innocent little fraud had been tried on a past-master in deception, and her own arrow glanced back to wound her, beyond cure perhaps. His duplicity was proved afterwards by the confession of his elder brother Ralph, a young man little better than himself, that the two girls had been the subject of a wager between them, which he had lost. This wager turned on which of the two should be first "successful" with one of the beautiful twins; and whether it showed only doubtful taste or infamous bad feeling depended on what interpretation was put on the word "success" by its perpetrators. A lenient one was possible so long as no worse came of it than that Thornton Daverill, the younger brother, became the accepted suitor of Maisie, and Ralph, the elder, the rejected one of Phoebe. Thornton's success was no doubt due in a great measure to Maisie's failure to mislead him about her identity, and Ralph's rejection possibly to the poor figure he cut when Phoebe played fast and loose with hers. That there was no truth or honour in Thornton's protestations to Maisie, or even honest loss of self-control under strong feeling, is evident from the fact that he told his brother as a good joke that his power of distinguishing between the girls was due to nothing more profound than that Maisie always gave him her hand to shake and Phoebe only her fingers. Possibly this test would only have held good in the case of men outside the family. It was connected with some minute sensitiveness of feeling towards that class, not perceptible by any other.

But in whatever sense Thornton and Maisie were trothplight, her father opposed their marriage, although it would no doubt have been a social elevation for the miller's daughter. It must be admitted that for once the inexorable parent may have been in the right. Tales had reached him, unhappily too late to prevent the formation of an acquaintance between the young squires and his daughters, of the profligacies—dissoluteness with women and at the gaming-table—of both these young men. And it is little wonder that he resolutely opposed the union of Thornton and Maisie—she a girl of nineteen!—at least until there was some sign of reform in the youth, some turning from his evil ways.

It was a sad thing for Maisie that her father's exclusiveness had created so many obstacles to the associations of his daughters with older women. No one had ever taken the place of a mother to them. It is rare enough for even a mother to speak explicitly to her daughter of what folk mean when they tell of the risks a girl runs who weds with a man like Thornton Daverill. But she may do so in such a way as to excite suspicion of the reality, and it is hard on motherless girls that they should not have this slender chance. A father can do nothing, and old fulminations of well-worn Scriptural jargon—hers was an adept in texts—had not even the force of their brutal plain speech. For to these girls the speech was not plain—it was only what Parson read in Church. That described and exhausted it.

The rest of the story follows naturally—too naturally—from the position shown in the above hasty sketch. Old Isaac Runciman's ill-temper, combined with an almost ludicrous want of tact, took the form of forbidding Thornton Daverill the house. The student of the art of dragging lovers asunder cannot be too mindful of the fact that the more they see of each other, the sooner they will be ripe for separation. If Maisie had been difficult to influence when her father contented himself with saying that he forbade the marriage ex cathedra paternæ auctoritatis, she became absolutely intractable when, some time after, this authority went the length of interdicting communications. Secret interviews, about double the length of the public ones they supplanted, gave the indignant parent an excuse for locking the girl into her own room. All worked well for the purpose of a thoroughly unprincipled scoundrel. Thornton, who would probably have married Maisie if nothing but legal possession had been open to him, saw his way to the same advantages without the responsibilities of marriage, and jumped at them. Do not blame Maisie overmuch for her share of what came about. The step she consented to was one of which the full meaning could only be half known to a girl of her age and experience. And the man into whose hands it threw her past recovery was in her eyes the soul of honour and chivalry—ill-judging, if at all, from the influence of a too passionate adoration for herself. Conception of the degree and nature of his wickedness was probably impossible to her; and, indeed, may have been so still—however strange it may seem—to the very old lady whom, under the name of Mrs. Prichard, Dolly Wardle used to visit in Sapps Court, "Mrs. Picture in the topackest" being the nearest shot she was able to make at her description.

Whether it was so or not, this old, old woman was the very selfsame Maisie that sixty odd years before lent a too willing ear to the importunities of a traitor, masquerading with a purpose; and ultimately consented to a runaway marriage with him, he being alone responsible for the arrangement of it and the legality of the wedding. The most flimsy mise en scène of a mock ceremony was sufficient to dupe a simplicity like hers; and therein was enacted the wicked old tragedy possible only in a world like ours, which ignores the pledge of the strong to the weak, however clearly that pledge may be attested, unless the wording of it jumps with the formularies of a sanctioned legalism. A grievous wrong was perpetrated, which only the dishonesty of Themis permits; for an honest lawgiver's aim should be to find means of enforcing a sham marriage, all the more relentlessly in proportion to the victim's innocence and the audacity of the imposture.

The story of Maisie's after-life need hardly have been so terrible, on the supposition that the prayer "God, have mercy upon us!" is ever granted. Surely some of the stabs in store for her need not have gone to the knife-hilt. Much information is lacking to make the tale complete, but what follows is enough. Listen to it and fill in the blanks if you can—with surmise of alleviation, with interstices of hypothetical happiness—however little warrant the known facts of the case may carry with them.

Thornton Daverill was destined to bring down Nemesis on his head by touching Themis on a sensitive point—monetary integrity. Within five years, a curious skill which he possessed of simulating the handwriting of others, combined with a pressing want of ready money, led him to the commission of an act which turned out a great error in tactics, whatever place we assign it in morality. Morally, the forgery of a signature, especially if it be to bring about a diminution of cash in a well-filled pocket, is a mere peccadillo compared with the malversation of a young girl's life. Legally it is felony, and he who commits it may get as long a term of penal servitude as the murderer of whose guilt the jury is not confident up to hanging point.

The severity of the penal laws in the reign of George III. was due no doubt to a vindictiveness against the culprit which—in theory at any rate—is nowadays obsolete, legislation having for its object rather the discouragement of crime on the tapis than the meting out of their deserts to malefactors. In those days the indignation of a jury would rise to boiling-point in dealing with an offence against sacred Property, while its blood-heat would remain normal over the deception and ruin of a mere woman. Therefore the jury that tried Thornton Daverill for forging the signature of Isaac Runciman on the back of a promissory note found the accused guilty, and the judge inflicted the severest penalty but one that Law allows. For Thornton might have been hanged.

But neither judge nor jury seemed much interested in the convict's behaviour to the daughter of the man he had tried to swindle out of money. On the contrary, they jumped to the conclusion that his wife was morally his accomplice; and, indeed, if it had not been for her great beauty she would very likely have gone to the galleys too. There was, however, this difference between their positions, that the prosecution was dependent on her father's affidavit to prove that the signature was a forgery, and so long as only the man he hated was legally involved, he was to be relied on to adhere to his first disclaimer of it. Had Maisie been placed beside her husband in the dock, how easily her father might have procured the liberation of both by accepting his liability—changing his mind about the signature and discharging the amount claimed! If the continuance of the prosecution had depended on either payer or payee, this would have been the end of it. What the creditor—a usurer—wanted was his money, not revenge. Indeed, Thornton would never have been made the subject of a criminal indictment at his instance, except to put pressure on Isaac Runciman for payment for his daughter's sake.

The bringing of the case into Court created a new position. An accommodation that would have been easy enough at first—an excusable compounding of a felony—became impossible under the eyes of the Bench. And this more especially because one of the Judges of Assize who tried the case acquired an interest in Maisie analogous to the one King David took in the wife of Uriah the Hittite, and perceived the advantages he would derive if this forger and gambler was packed off to a life far worse than the death the astute monarch schemed for the great-hearted soldier who was serving him. Whether the two were lawfully man and wife made no difference to this Judge. Maisie's devotion to her scoundrel was the point his lordship's legal acumen was alive to, and he himself was scarcely King of Israel. One wonders sometimes—at least, the present writer has done so—what Bathsheba's feelings were on the occasion referred to. We can only surmise, and can do little more in the case of Maisie. The materials for the retelling of this story are very slight. Their source may be referred to later. For the moment it must be content with the bare facts.

This Bathsheba was able to say "Hands off!" to her King David, and also able—but Heaven knows how!—to keep up a correspondence with the worthless parallel of the Hittite throughout the period of his detention in an English gaol, or, it may be, on the river hulks, until his deportation in a convict ship to Sydney, from which place occasional letters reached her, which were probably as frequent as his opportunities of sending them, until, a considerable time later—perhaps as much as five years; dates are not easy to fix—one came saying that he expected shortly to be transferred to the new penal settlement in Van Diemen's Land.

At the beginning of last century the black hulks on the Thames and elsewhere were known and spoken of truly as "floating Hells." Any penal colony was in one point worse; he who went there left Hope behind, so far as his hopes were centred in his native land. For to return was Death.

After his transfer to Van Diemen's Land, no letter reached her for some months. Then came news that Thornton had benefited by the extraordinary fulness of the powers granted to the Governors of these penal settlements, who practically received the convicts on lease for the term of their service. They were, in fact, slaves. But this told well for Maisie's husband, whose father had been at school with the then supreme authority at Macquarie Harbour. This got him almost on his arrival a ticket-of-leave, by virtue of which he was free within the island during good behaviour. He soon contrived, by his superior education and manners, to get a foothold in a rough community, and saw his way to rising in the world, even to prosperity. In a very short time, said a later letter, he would save enough to pay Maisie's passage out, and then she could join him. The only redeeming trait the story shows of this man is his strange confidence that this girl, whom he had cruelly betrayed, would face all the terrors of a three-months' sea-voyage and travel, alone in a strange land, to become the slave and helpless dependent of a convict on ticket-of-leave.

She had returned to her father's house a year after the trial, her sister having threatened to leave it unless her father permitted her to do so, taking with her her two children; a very delicate little boy, born in the first year of her marriage, and a girl baby only four months old, which had come into the world eight months after its wretched parent's conviction. During this life at her father's the little boy died. He had been christened, after his father and uncle, Phoebe's rejected suitor—Ralph Thornton Daverill. The little girl she had baptized by the name of Ruth. This little Ruth she took with her, when, on Phoebe's marriage two years later, she went to live at the house of the new-married couple; and one would have said that the twins lived in even closer union than before, and that nothing could part them again.

It would have been a mistake. Within three years Maisie received a letter enclosing a draft on a London bank for more than her passage-money, naming an agent who would arrange for her in everything, and ending with a postscript:—"Come out at once." Shortly after, no change having been noticeable in her deportment, except, perhaps, an increased tenderness to her child and her sister, she vanished suddenly; leaving only a letter to Phoebe, full of contrition for her behaviour, but saying that her first duty was towards her husband. She had not dared to take with her her child, and it had been a bitter grief to her to forsake it, but she knew well that it would have been as great a bitterness to Phoebe to lose it, as she was herself childless at the time; and, indeed, her only consolation was that Phoebe would still continue to be, as it were, a second mother to "their child," which was the light in which each had always looked upon it.

Both of them seemed to have been under an impression that only one of two twins can ever become a mother. Whether there is any foundation for this, or whether it is a version of a not uncommon belief that twins are always childless, the story need not stop to inquire. It was falsified in this case by the birth of a son to Phoebe, en secondes noces, many years later. But this hardly touches the story, as this son died in his childhood. All that is needed to be known at present is that, as the result of Maisie's sudden disappearance, Phoebe was left in sole possession of her four-year-old daughter, to whose young mind it was a matter of indifference which of two almost indistinguishable identities she called by the name of mother. With a little encouragement she accepted the plenary title for the then childless woman to whom the name gave pleasure, and gradually forgot the mother who had deserted her; who, in the course of very little time, became the shadow of a name. All she knew then was that this mother had gone away in a ship; and, indeed, for months after little more was known to her aunt.

However, a brief letter did come from the ship, just starting for Sydney, and the next long-delayed one announced her arrival there, and how she had been met at the port by an agent who would make all arrangements for her further voyage. How this agency managed to get her through to Hobart Town in those days is a mystery, for there was no free immigration to the island till many years after, only transports from New South Wales being permitted to enter the port. She got there certainly, and was met by her husband at the ship. And well for her that it was so, for in those days no woman was safe by herself for an hour in that country.

It may seem wonderful that so vile a man should have set himself to consult the happiness of a woman towards whom he was under no obligation. But her letters to her sister showed that he did so; and those who have any experience of womanless lands men have to dwell in, whether or no, know that in such lands the market-value of a good sample is so far above rubies, that he who has one, and could not afford another if he lost the first, will be quite kind and nice and considerate to his treasure, in case King Solomon should come round, with all the crown-jewels to back him and his mother's valuation to encourage a high bid. Phoebe had for four or five years the satisfaction of receiving letters assuring her of her sister's happiness and of the extraordinary good fortune that had come to the reformed gambler and forger, whose prison-life had given him a distaste for crimes actively condemned by Society.

Among the items of news that these letters contained were the births of two boys. The elder was called Isaac after his grandfather at the urgent request of Maisie; but on condition that if another boy came he should be called Ralph Thornton, a repetition of the name of her first baby, which died in England. This is done commonly enough with a single name, but the duplication is exceptional. Whether the name was actually used for the younger child Phoebe never knew. Probably a letter was lost containing the information.

When Isaac Runciman died Phoebe wrote the news of his death to Maisie and received no reply from her. In its stead—that is to say, at about the time it would have been due—came a letter from Thornton Daverill announcing her sister's death in Australia. It was a brief, unsatisfying letter. Still, she hoped to receive more details, especially as she had followed her first letter, telling of her father's death, with another a fortnight later, giving fuller particulars of the occurrence. In due course came a second letter from her brother-in-law, professing contrition for the abruptness of his first, but excusing it on the ground that he was prostrated with grief at the time, and quite unable to write. He added very full and even dramatic particulars of her sister's death, giving her last message to her English relatives, and so forth.

But that sister was not dead. And herein follow the facts that have come to light of the means her husband employed to make her seem so, and of his motives for employing them.

To see these clearly you must keep in mind that Thornton was tied for life within the limits of the penal settlements. Maisie was free to go; with her it was merely a question of money. As time went on, her yearning to see her child and her twin-sister again grew and grew, and her appeals to her husband to allow her sometime to revisit England in accordance with his promise became every year more and more urgent. He would be quite a rich man soon—why should she not? Well—simply that she might not come back! That was his view, and we have to bear in mind that it would have been impossible for him to replace her, except from among female convicts assigned to settlers; nominally as servants, but actually as mates on hire—suppose we call them. One need not say much of this unhappy class; it is only mentioned to show that Thornton could have found no woman to take the place of the beautiful and devoted helpmeet whose constancy to him had survived every trial. No wonder he was ill at ease with the idea of her adventuring back to England alone. But it took a mind as wicked as his to conceive and execute the means by which he prevented it. It seems to have been suggested by the fact that the distribution of letters in his district had been assigned to him by the Governor. This made it easy to deliver them or keep them back, when it was in his interest to do so, without fear of detection. The letters coming from England were few indeed, so he was able to examine them at leisure.

At first he was content to withhold Phoebe's letters, hoping that Maisie would be satisfied with negative evidence of her death, which he himself suggested as the probable cause of their suspension. But when this only increased her anxiety to return to her native land, he cast about for something he could present as direct proof. The death of her father supplied the opportunity. A black-edged sheet came, thickly written with Phoebe's account of his last illness, in ink which, as the event showed, did not defy obliteration. Probably Thornton had learned, among malefactors convicted of his own offence, secrets of forgery that would seem incredible to you or me. He contrived to obliterate this sheet all but the date-stamps outside, and then—the more readily that he had been informed that only fraud for gain made forgery felony—elaborated as a palimpsest a most careful letter in the handwriting of the father announcing Phoebe's own death, and also that of the daughter whom Maisie had bequeathed to her care. He must have been inspired and upborne in this difficult task by the spirit of a true artist. No doubt all faussure, to any person with an accommodating moral sense, is an unmixed delight. This letter remains, and has been seen by the present writer and others. The dexterity of the thing almost passes belief, only a few scarcely perceptible traces of the old writing being visible, the length of the new words being so chosen as to hide most of the old ones. What is even more incredible is that the original letter from Phoebe was deciphered at the British Museum by the courtesy of the gentlemen engaged in the deciphering and explanation of obscure inscriptions.

The elaborate fiction the forger devised may have been in part due to a true artist's pleasure in the use of a splendid opportunity, such as might never occur again. But on close examination one sees that it was little more than a skilful recognition of the exigencies of the case. The object of the letter was to remove once and for ever all temptation to Maisie to return to her native land. Now, so long as either her sister or her little girl were living in England the old inducement would be always at work. Why not kill them both, while he had the choice? It would be more troublesome to produce proof of the death of either, later. But he mistrusted his skill in dealing with fatal illness. A blunder might destroy everything. Stop!—he knew something better than that. Had not the transport that brought him out passed a drowned body afloat, and wreckage, even in the English Channel? Shipwreck was the thing! He decided on sending Nicholas Cropredy, his wife's brother-in-law, across the Channel on business—to Antwerp, say—and making Phoebe and little Ruth go out to nurse him through a fever. Their ship could go to the bottom, with a stroke of his pen. Only, while he was about it, why not clear away the brother-in-law—send them all out in the same ship? No—that would not do! Where would the motive be, for all those three to leave England? A commercial mission for the man alone would be quite another thing. Very perplexing!... Yes—no—yes!... There—he had got it! Let them go out and nurse him through a fever, and all be drowned together, returning to England.

That was a triumph. And the finishing touch to the narrative he based on it was really genius. Little hope was entertained of the recovery of the remains, but it was not impossible. The writer's daughter might rest assured that if any came to the surface, and were identified, they should be interred in the family grave where her mother reposed in the Lord, in the sure and certain hope of a joyful resurrection.

Was it to be wondered at that so skilful a contrivance duped an unsuspicious mind like Maisie's? The only thing that could have excited suspicion was that the letter had been delayed a post—time, you see, was needed for the delicate work of forgery—and the date of despatch from London was in consequence some two months too old. But then the letter was of the same date; indeed, the forgery was a repeat of the letter it effaced, wherever this was possible. Besides, the delay of a letter from England could never occasion surprise.

She took the sealed paper from her husband, breaking the seals with feverish haste, and destroying the only proof that it had been opened on the way. For the wax, of course, broke, as her husband had foreseen, on its old fractures, where he had parted them carefully and reattached them with some similar wax dissolved in spirit. He watched her reading the letter, not without an artist's pride at her absolute unsuspicion, and then had to undergo a pang of fear lest the news should kill her. For she fell insensible, only to remain for a long time prostrate with grief, after a slow and painful revival.

There was little need for Thornton to reply to Phoebe's letter that he had effaced. Nevertheless, he did so; partly, perhaps, from the pleasure he naturally took in playing out the false rôle he had assigned himself. Yes—he was a widower. But the poignancy of his grief had prevented him writing all the particulars of his wife's death. He now gave the story of the death of a woman on a farm near, with changed names and some clever addenda, the composition of which amused his leisure and gratified a spirit of falsehood which might, more fortunately employed, have found an outlet in literary fiction. The effect of this letter on Phoebe was to satisfy her so completely of her sister's death that, had it ever been called in question, she would have been the hardest to convert to a belief in the contrary. On the other hand, Maisie's belief in her death was equally assured, and her quasi-husband rested secure in his confidence that nothing would now induce her to leave him. Should he ever wish to be rid of her, he had only to confess his deception, and pack her off to seek her sister. That no news ever came of her father's death was not a matter of great surprise to Maisie. She had no surviving correspondent in England who would have written about it. Her husband may have practised some finesse later to convince her of it, but its details are not known to the writer of the story.

They, however, were never parted until, twenty years later, his death left Maisie a widow, as she believed. It would have been well for her had it been so, for he died after making that very common testamentary mistake—a too ingenious will. It left to "my third son Ralph Thornton Daverill," on coming of age, all his property after "my wife Maisie, née Runciman," had received the share she was "legally entitled to." But she was unable to produce proof of her marriage when called on to do so, and was, of course, legally entitled to nothing. Thornton had been so well off that "widow's thirds" would have placed her in comfortable circumstances. As it was, the whole of his property went to her only surviving son, a youth who had inherited, with some of his father's good looks, all his bad principles; and in addition a taint—we may suppose—of the penal atmosphere in which he was born. But there was not a shadow of doubt about his being the person named in the will. Perhaps, if it had been worded "my lawful son," Themis would have jibbed.

The young man, on coming of age, acquired control of the whole of his father's property, and soon started on a career of extravagance and debauchery. His mother, however, retained some influence over him, and persuaded him, a year later, before he had had time to dissipate the whole of his inheritance, to return with her to England, hoping that the moral effect of a change from the gaol-bird atmosphere of felony that hung over the whole land of his birth would develop whatever germ of honour or right feeling he possessed.

She was not very sanguine, for his boyhood had been a cruel affliction to her. And the results showed that whatever hopes she had entertained were ill-founded. Arrived in London, with money still at command, he plunged at once into all the dissipations of the town, and it became evident that in the course of a year or so he would run through the remainder of his patrimony.

About this time he met with an experience which now and then happens to men of his class. He fell violently in love—or in what he called love—with a girl who had very distinct ideas on the subject of marriage. One was that the first arrangement of their relations which suggested themselves to her lover were not to be entertained, and therefore she refused to entertain them. He tried ridicule, indignation, and protestation—all in vain! She appeared not to object to persecution—rather liked it. But she held out no hopes except legitimate ones. At last, when the young man was in a sense desperate—not in a very noble sense, but desperate for all that—she intimated to him that, unless he was prepared to accept her scheme of life, she knew a very respectable young man who was; a young man in Smithfield Market with whom she had walked out, and you could never have told. Which means that this young man disguised himself so subtly on Sunday to go into Society, that none would have guessed that he passed the week in contact with grease and blood, and dared to twist the tails of bullocks in revolt against their fate, shrinking naturally from the axe. His intentions were, nevertheless, honourable, and Polly, the barmaid at the One Tun Inn, honoured them, while her affections were disposed towards her Australian suitor whose intentions were not. The young reprobate, however, had to climb down; but he made his surrender conditional on one thing—that his marriage with Polly should remain a secret. No doubt parallel enterprises would have been interrupted by its publication. Anyhow, his mother never knew of his marriage, nor set eyes on her daughter-in-law.

His marriage was, in fact, merely a means to an end, and was a most reluctant concession to circumstances on his part. It was true he deprived himself of all chance of offering the same terms again for the same goods, unless, indeed, he ran the risks of a bigamist. But what can a man do under such circumstances? He is what he is, and it does seem a pity sometimes that he was made in the image of God, whether for God's sake or his own. Young Daverill's end attained, he flung away his prize almost without a term of intermediate neglect to save his face. She, poor soul, who had lived under the impression that all men were "like that" but that honourable marriage "reformed" them, was desperate at first when she found her mistake. Her "lawful husband," having attained his end, announced his weariness of lawful marriage with a candour even coarser than that of Browning's less lawful possessor of Love—he who "half sighed a smile in a yawn, as 'twere." He replied, to all Polly's passionate claims to him as a legal right, and hints that she could and would enforce her position:—"Try it on, Poll—you and your lawyers!" And, indeed, we have never been able to learn how the strong arm of the Law enforces marital obligations; barring mere cash payments, of which Polly's attitude was quite oblivious. Moreover, he was at that time prepared with money, and did actually maintain his wife up to the point of every possible legal compulsion until the end of his solvency, not a very long period.

For his life-drama, or the first act of it, was soon played out. It was substantially his father's over again. He ran through what was left of his money in a little over a year—so splendid were the gambler's opportunities in these days; for the Georgian era had still a short lease of years to run, and folly dies hard. His attempts to reinstate himself at the expense of a Bank, by a simple process of burglary, in partnership with a professional hand whose acquaintance he had made at "The Tun," led to disastrous failure and the summary conviction of both partners.

None of this came to the knowledge of his wife, as how should it? He wrote no news of it to her, and their relation was known to very few. Moreover, the burglary was in Bristol and Polly was at a farmhouse in Lincolnshire, awaiting a birth which only added another grief to her life, for her child was born dead. She recovered from a long illness which swallowed up the remains of the money her husband had given her, to find herself destitute and minus most of the good looks which had obtained for her her previous situation. She succeeded thereafter in maintaining herself by needlework—she was an adept in that—and so avoided becoming an incumbrance on her family, which she could no longer help now as she had done in her prosperity. But of her worthless husband's fate she never knew anything, the trial having taken place during an illness which nearly ended all her miseries for her. By the time she was on the way to recovery it would have been difficult to trace her husband, even had she had any motive for doing so.

As for him—a convict and the son of a convict—his period of detention in the hulks on the Thames was followed by the usual voyage to the Antipodes; but this time the vessel into which he was transhipped at Sydney sailed for Norfolk Island, not Hobart Town nor Macquarie Harbour. Maisie's son was not destined to revisit the land of his birth. The early deliverance from actual bondage to a condition free in all but the name, which had led to his father's successful later career, was impossible in an island half the size of the Isle of Wight, and the man grew to his surroundings. A soul ready to accept the impress of every stamp of depravity in the mint of vice was soon well beyond the reach of any possible redemption in contact with the moral vileness of the prisons on what was, but for their contamination, one of the loveliest islands in the Pacific.

After his departure his mother may have been influenced by a wish to obliterate her whole past, and this wish may have been the cause of her adoption of a name not her own. Some lingering reluctance to make her severance from her own belongings absolute may have dictated the choice of the name of Prichard, which was that of an old nurse of her childhood, who had stood by her mother's dying bed. It would serve every reasonable purpose of disguise without grating on memories of bygone times. A shred of identity was left to cling to. It is less clear why the quasi-daughter whom she had never seen should have repudiated her married name. Polly was under no obligation not to call herself Mrs. Daverill, unless it were compliance with her promise to keep the marriage secret. She, however, acquiesced in the Mrs., and supplied a name as a passport to a respectable widowhood. But she did not dress the part very vigorously, and report soon accepted the husband as a bad lot and a riddance. Nothing very uncommon in that!

CHAPTER VII

OF DAVE WARDLE'S CONVALESCENCE. OF MRS. RUTH THRALE, WIDOW AND OGRESS, WHO APPRECIATED HIM. HIS ACCOUNT OF HIS HOSPITAL EXPERIENCE. HOW HE MADE THE ACQUAINTANCE OF A COUNTESS, AND TOLD HER ABOUT WIDOW THRALE'S GRANDFATHER'S WATER-MILL. CONCERNING JUNO LUCINA. THESEUS AND ARIADNE. HOW DAVE DETECTED A FAMILY LIKENESS, AND NEARLY RUBBED HIS EYES OUT. HOW GRANNY MARRABLE SHOWED HIM THE MILL AT WORK AND MR. MUGGERIDGE

If the daylight were not so short in October at Chorlton-under-Bradbury, in Rocestershire, that month would quite do for summer in as many autumns as not. As it is, from ten till five, the sun that comes to say goodbye to the apples, that will all be plucked by the end of the month, is so strong that forest trees are duped, and are ready to do their part towards a green Yule if only the midday warmth will linger on to those deadly small hours of the morning, when hoarfrost gets the thin end of its wedge into the almanack, and sleepers go the length of coming out of bed for something to put over their feet, and end by putting it over most of their total. From ten till five, at least, the last swallows seem to be reconsidering their departure, and the skylarks to be taking heart, and thinking they can go on ever so much longer. Then, not unfrequently, day falls in love with night for the sake of the moonrise, and dies of its passion in a blaze of golden splendour. But the memory of her does not live long into the heart of the night, as it did in the long summer twilights. Love cools and the dews fall, and the winds sing dirges in the elms through the leaves they will so soon scatter about the world without remorse; and then one morning the grass is crisp with frost beneath the early riser's feet, and he finds the leaves of the ash all fallen since the dawn, a green, still heap below their old boughs stript and cold. And he goes home and has all sorts of things for breakfast, being in England.

But no early riser had had this experience at Chorlton-under-Bradbury on that October afternoon when Dave Wardle, personally conducted by Sister Nora, and very tired with travelling from a distant railway-station—the local line was not there in the fifties—descended from the coach or omnibus at the garden gate of Widow Thrale, the good woman who was going to feed him, sleep him, and enjoy his society during convalescence.

The coach or omnibus touched its hat and accepted something from Sister Nora, and went on to the Six Bells in High Street, where the something took the form of something else to drink, which got into its head. The High Street was very wide, and had more water-troughs for horses than recommended themselves to the understanding. But they might have succeeded in doing so before the railway came in these parts, turning everything to the rightabout, as Trufitt phrased it at the Bells. There were six such troughs within a hundred yards; and, as their contents never got into the horses' heads, what odds if there were? When the world was reasonable and four or five horns were heard blowing at once, often enough, in the high road, no one ever complained, that old Trufitt ever heard tell of. So presumably there were no odds.

Widow Thrale lived with an old lady of eighty, who was also a widow; or, one might have said, even more so, seeing that her widowhood was a double one, her surname, Marrable, being the third she had borne. She was, however, never called Widow Marrable, but always Granny Marrable; and Dave's hostess, who was to take charge of him, was not her daughter, as might have seemed most probable, but a niece who had filled the place of a daughter to her and was always so spoken of. What an active and vigorous octogenarian she was may be judged from the fact that, at the moment of the story, she was taking on herself the task of ushering into the world her first great-grandchild, the son or daughter—as might turn out—of her granddaughter, Maisie Costrell, the only daughter of Widow Thrale. For this young woman had ordained that "Granny" should officiate as high-priestess on this occasion, and we know it is just as well to give way to ladies under such circumstances.

So when Dave and Sister Nora were deposited by the coach at Strides Cottage, it was Widow Thrale who received them. She did not produce on the lady the effect of a bona-fide widow of fifty-five—this description had been given of her—not so much because of the non-viduity of her costume, for that was temperate and negative, as because Time seemed to have let his ravages stand over for the present. Very few casual observers would have guessed that she was over forty-five. Ruth Thrale—that was her name in full—had two sons surviving of her own family, both at sea, and one daughter, Maisie Costrell aforesaid. So she was practically now without incumbrances, and terribly wanting some to kiss, had hit upon the expedient of taking charge of invalid children and fostering them up to kissing-point. They were often poor, wasted little articles enough at the first go off, but Mrs. Ruth usually succeeded in making them succulent in a month or so. It was exasperating, though, to have them go away just as they were beginning to pay for fattening. The case was analogous to that of an ogress balked of her meal, after going to no end of expense in humanised cream and such-like.

All the ogress rose in her heart when she saw our little friend Dave Wardle. But she was very careful about his stiff leg. Her eyes gleamed at the opportunities he would present for injudicious overfeeding—or suppose we say stuffing at once and have done with it. A banquet was ready prepared for him, to which he was adapted in a chair of suitable height, and which he began absorbing into his system without apparently registering any date of completion. You must not imagine he had been stinted of food on the journey: indeed, he may be said to have been taking refreshment more or less all the way from London. But he was one of the sort that can go steadily on, converting helpings into small boy, apparently without intermediate scientific events—gastric juice and blood-corpuscles, and so forth. He was able to converse affably the while, accepting suggestions as to method in the spirit in which they were given. In reporting his remarks the spelling cannot be too phonetical; if unintelligible at first, read them literally aloud to a hearer who does not see the letterpress. The conversation had turned on Dave's accident.

"Oy sawed the firing gin coming, and oy said to stoarp, and the firing gin didn't stoarpt, and it said whoy—whoy—whoy!" This was an attempt to render the expressive cry of the brigade; now replaced, we believe, by a tame bell. "Oy sawed free men shoyning like scandles, and Dolly sawed nuffink—no, nuffink!" The little man's voice got quite sad here. Think what he had seen and Dolly had missed!

Mrs. Ruth was harrowed by what the child must have suffered. She expressed her feelings to Sister Nora. Not, however, without Dave catching their meaning. He was very sharp.

"It hurted at the Hospital," said he. That is, the accident itself had been too sudden and overwhelming to admit of any estimate of the pain it caused; the suffering came with the return of consciousness. Then he added, rather inexplicably:—"It didn't hurted Dolly."

Sister Nora, looking with an amused, puzzled face at the small absurdity, assimilating suitable nourishment and wrestling with his mother-tongue at its outset, said:—"Why didn't it hurted Dolly, I wonder?" and them illuminated:—"Oh—I see! It balances Dolly's account. Dolly was the loser by not seeing the fire-engine, but she escaped the accident. Of course!" Whereupon the ogress said with gravity, after due reflection: "I think you are right, ma'am." She then pointed out to Dave that well-regulated circles sit still at their suppers, whereas he had allowed his feelings, on hearing his intelligibility confirmed, to break out in his legs and kick those of the table. He appeared to believe his informant, and to determine to frame his behaviour for the future on the practices of those circles. But he should have taken his spoon out of his mouth while forming this resolution.

He then, as one wishing to entertain in Society, went on to detail his experiences in the Hospital, giving first—as it is always well to begin at the beginning—the names of the staff as he had mastered them. There was Dr. Dabtinkle, or it might have been Damned Tinker, a doubtful name; and Drs. Inkstraw, Jarbottle, and Toby. His hearers were able to identify the names of Dalrymple, Inglethorpe, and Harborough. They were at work on Toby, who defied detection, when it became evident that sleep was overwhelming their informant. He was half roused to be put in a clean nightgown that smelt of lavender, and then curled round his hands and forgot the whole Universe.

"What a nice little man he is!" said Sister Nora. "He's quite a baby still, though he's more than six. Some of the London children are so old. But this child's people seem nice and old-fashioned, although his uncle was a prizefighter."

"Laws-a-me!" said Mrs. Ruth. "To think of that now! A prizefighter!" And she had to turn back to Dave's crib, which they were just leaving, to see whether this degraded profession had set its stamp on her prey.... No, it was all right! She could gloat over that sleeping creature without misgiving.

"I've just thought who Toby is," said Sister Nora. "Of course, it's Dr. Trowbridge, the head surgeon. I fancy, now I come to think of it, the juniors are apt to speak of him without any Dr. I don't know why. I shall tell Dr. Damned Tinker his name.... Oh no—he won't be offended."

Sister Nora was driven away to the mansion of her noble relative, three miles off, in a magnificent carriage that was sent for her, in which she must have felt insignificant. Perhaps she got there in time to dress for dinner, perhaps not. Wearers of uniforms wash and brush up: they don't dress.

She reappeared at Mrs. Marrable's cottage two days later, in the same vehicle, accompanied by the Countess her aunt, who remained therein. Dave was brought out to make her acquaintance, but not to be taken for a long drive—only a very short one, just up and down and round, because Sister Nora wouldn't be more than five minutes. He was relieved when he found himself safe inside the carriage with her, out of the way of her haughty and overdressed serving-men, whom he mistrusted. The coachman, Blencorn, was too high up in the air for human intercourse. Dave found the lady in the carriage more his sort, and told her, in Sister Nora's absence—she having vanished into the house—many interesting experiences of country life. The ogress had taken off his clean shirt, which he had felt proud of, and looked forward to a long acquaintance with; substituting another, equally good, perhaps, but premature. She had fed him well; he gave close particulars of the diet, laying especial stress on the fact that he had requisitioned the outside piece, presumably of the loaf, but possibly of some cake. Her ladyship seemed to think its provenance less important than its destination. She was able to identity from her own experience a liquid called scream, of which Dave had bespoken a large jug full, to be taken to Dolly on his return home. He went on to relate how he had been shown bees, a calf, and a fool with long legs; about which last the lady was for a moment at fault, having pictured to herself a Shakespearean one with a bauble. It proved to be a young horse, a very young one, whose greedy habits Dave described with a simple but effective directness. But he was destined to puzzle his audience by his keen interest in something that was on the mantleshelf, his description of which seemed to relate to nothing this lady's recollection of Strides interior supplied.

"What on earth does the little man mean by a water-cart on the mantelshelf, Mrs. Thrale?" said the Countess on leavetaking. The widow had come out to reclaim her young charge, who seemed not exactly indignant but perceptibly disappointed, at her ladyship's slowness of apprehension. He plunged afresh into his elucidation of the subject. There was a water-cart with four horses, to grind the flour to make the bread, behind a glast on the chimley-shelf. He knew he was right, and appealed to Europe for confirmation, more to reinstate his character for veracity than to bring the details of the topic into prominence.

"That is entirely right, my lady," said Widow Thrale, apologetic for contradiction from her duty to conscience on the one hand, and her reluctance to correct her superiors on the other, but under compulsion from the former. "Quite correct. He's chattering about my grandfather's model of his mill. He doesn't mean water-cart. He means water-mill. Only there's a cart with horses in the yard. It's a hundred years old. It's quite got between the child's mind and his reason, and he wants to see it work like I've told him."

"Yes," said Dave emphatically, "with water in the cistern." He stopped suddenly—you may believe it or not—because of a misgiving crossing his mind that he was using some of Sister Nora's name too freely. Find out where for yourself.

However, nothing of the sort seemed to cross anyone else's mind, so Dave hoped he was mistaken. His hostess proceeded to explain why she could not gratify his anxiety to see this contrivance at work. "I could show it to him perfectly well," she said, "only to humour a fancy of Granny's. She never would have anyone touch it but herself, so we shall have to have patience, some of us." Dave wondered who the other spectators would be when the time came—would the Countess be one of them? And would she get down and come into the house, or have it brought out for her to see in the carriage?

Mrs. Thrale continued:—"I should say it hadn't been set a-going now for twenty years.... No, more! It was for the pleasuring and amusement of my little half-brother Robert she made it work, and we buried him more years ago than that." And then they talked about something else, which Dave did not closely follow, because he was so sorry for Mrs. Thrale. He could not resist the conviction that her little half-brother Robert was dead. Because, if not, they surely never would have buried him. He was unable to work this out to a satisfactory conclusion, because Sister Nora was waiting to resume her place in the carriage, and he had no sooner surrendered it to her than the lateness of the hour was recognised, and the distinguished visitors drove away in a hurry.