CHAPTER VI

Days went on, months went on, years went on, as they have a habit of doing, till Boy arrived at the mature age of nine. Changes had occurred during this period, which slight in themselves were destined to have their lasting effect upon his character and temperament. To begin with, Captain and Mrs. D’Arcy-Muir had been compelled, through the force of circumstances, to leave the house in Hereford Square, and give up living in London altogether. The Honourable Captain’s means had been considerably straitened through his “little ways,” and often and often during occasional flashes of sobriety it would occur to him that Boy was steadily growing, and that what a d----d pity it was that Miss Leslie had not adopted him after all. Once or twice he had broached the subject to his wife, but only to be met by a large placid smile, and the remark--

“Jim, I really am surprised at you! I thought you had more pride. But really you don’t seem to mind the idea of your only son being put in the position of a pauper!”

“Don’t see where the pauper comes in,” growled the Honourable Jim. “A hundred thousand pounds is surely enough to keep a man from the workhouse. And if that lot of money is going around begging, I don’t see why the little chap shouldn’t have it. I’ve nothing to leave him,--why the deuce don’t you let the old lady take him and have done with it?”

“Well!” exclaimed Mrs. D’Arcy-Muir, with a lachrymose air of deeply seated injury, “if you are so lost to decency as to wish to part from your own flesh and blood----”

“Oh, hang it all!” burst out the “Honourable” scion of century-condensed aristocracy: “D----n your flesh and blood! Have it your own way! Do as you d----n please! Only don’t bother me.”

In this way such marital discussions always ended,--and Boy struggled steadily along in growth and being and thought, wholly unconscious of them. He had lost sight of Miss Letty, but truly had not forgotten her--though in the remote village on the sea coast where his father had now elected to dwell in order that he might indulge in his pet vice without undue public comment or observation, he found himself so utterly estranged from all delicate and helpful sympathies as to be almost rendered stunned and stupid. In the first year after he had left London he was taught some desultory lessons by a stolid-faced country wench who passed for being a nursery governess, but whose abilities were chiefly limited to ogling the young sailor and farmer lads of the place, and inventing new fashions for arranging her coarsely abundant hair. Boy’s contempt for her knew no bounds: he would sit and watch her out of the corners of his eyes while she stood before a lookingglass, smirking at her own reflection, and quite unwittingly he developed a curious vein of satire which soon showed itself in some of the questions he put to her and to others. A sad little change had taken place in him--the far-off, beautiful angel look of his countenance had all but vanished, and an expression of dull patience combined with weariness had taken its place. For by this time of course he had found out the true nature of “Poo Sing’s” chronic illness, and the knowledge of it had filled him with an inexpressible disgust and shame. Child though he was, he was not too young to feel a sick thrill when he saw his father march into the house at night with the face, voice, and manner of an infuriated ruffian bent on murder. And he no longer sat in a chair innocently murmuring “Poo Sing”--but slunk away from the evil sight, whispering faintly to himself, “Father! Oh, father!” In dark corners of the house, and more often outside the house in a wooded little solitude of pines, where scarcely a bird’s wings fluttered to disturb the dark silence, Boy would sit by himself meditating, and occasionally reading--for he had been quick to learn his letters, and study offered as yet no very painful difficulties to him. He was naturally a boy of bright brain and acute perception--but the brightness had been darkened and the perception blunted by the ever down-pressing weight of home influences brought about by his father’s degradation and his mother’s indifference. He began to see clearly now that it was not without good cause he had felt sorry for his “Muzzy’s” ugliness, for that ugliness was the outcome of her own fault. He used to wander down to the border of the sea, mechanically carrying a tin pail and wooden spade, and there would sit shovelling in sand and shovelling it out again; and while thus engaged would sometimes find there one or two ladies walking with their children--ladies in trim serge skirts, and tidily belted blouses, and neat sailor-hats set gracefully on prettily arranged hair,--and he could not for the life of him understand why his mother should allow her dress to be less orderly than that of the cook, and her general appearance less inviting and odorous than that of the old woman who came round twice a week to sell prawns and shrimps at the door. And so he brooded and brooded--till on one sudden and alarming day the stolid nursery governess was found on his father’s knee, with his father’s arms clasped round her,--and such an appalling clamour ensued that Boy, who was of course not told the real reason of the disorder, stood terrified and thought every one in the house had gone raving mad, and that he, poor small chap, was left alone in the middle of a howling wilderness. The stolid nursery governess, on being discovered, had promptly fainted, and lay on the floor with her large feet well upturned and more than an inch of stocking exposed;--the “Honourable” Jim rattled out all his stock of oaths till he was black and blue in the face with impotent swearing, and Mrs. D’Arcy-Muir, plumping heavily down in the nearest convenient chair, lifted up her voice and wept. And in the middle of her weeping, happening to perceive Boy standing on the threshold of the room, very palefaced and half paralysed with fright, she caught him up in her arms and exclaimed, “My poor, dear, injured son!” with a wifely and maternal gusto that was more grotesque than impressive. Boy somehow felt that he was being made ridiculous, though he could not have told why. And when the stolid-faced nursery governess had prolonged her fainting fit as much as was desirable and endurable,--when with many grunts and sighs, spasmodic kicks and plunges, she righted herself, so to speak, first into a sitting posture, and then gradually rose to her feet, a tearful martyr to wrongful suspicions, and, with one injured-innocence look of reproach at Mrs. D’Arcy-Muir and a knowing side-wink at the irate and roaring “Jim,” left the room and afterwards the house, never to return, Boy lived for many days in a state of deep wonderment, not knowing what to make of it. It was a vast puzzle to his young mind, but he was conscious of a certain advantage to himself in the departure of the ill-used young woman, who had so casually superintended his few lessons in the intervals of dressing her hair. He was left very much more alone, and took to wandering--“daunering” as the Scotch would say--all about the village and down by the edge of the sea, like a small waif of the world, neglected and astray. He was free to amuse himself as he liked, so he strolled into all sorts of places, dirty and clean, and got his clothes torn and ragged, his hands and face scratched and soiled; and if it chanced that he fell into a mud-puddle or a sea-pool--which he often did--he never thought of telling his mother that he was wet through, because she never noticed it, and he therefore concluded that it did not matter. And he began to grow thin, and wiry, and brown, and unkempt, till there was very little difference in appearance between him and the common boys of the village, who were wont to haunt the sea-shore and pick up stray treasures in the way of weed and shell and wreckage there,--boys with whom he very soon began to fraternise, much to his detriment. They were not bad boys--but their language was brutal, and their manners more so. They called him a “ninny” when he first sought their society, and one big lout beat him on the head for his too sharp discovery of a shilling buried in the sand. But these were trifles; and after proving that he was not afraid of a ducking, or a stand-up fight either, they relented towards him, and allowed him to be an associate of their scavenger pursuits. Thus he learnt new forms of language and new customs of life, and gradually adopted the lazy, slouching walk of his shore-companions, together with their air of general indifference, only made occasionally piquant by a touch of impudence. Boy began to say sharp things now and then, though his little insolences savoured more of satire than malice. He did not mean to be rude at any time, but a certain vague satisfaction moved him when he found that he could occasionally make an observation which caused his elders to wince, and privately wonder whether their grey hairs were not standing on end. He rather repressed this power, however, and thought a good deal more than he said. He began to consider his mother in a new light,--her ways no longer puzzled him so much as they amused him. It was with almost a humorous condescension that the child sat down obediently to his morning lessons with her,--lessons which she, with much elaboration and importance, had devised for his instruction. Truth to tell, they were very easy samples of learning,--her dense brain was not capable of arranging anything more than the most ordinary forms of study,--and Boy learnt more of the world in an hour’s listening to the chat of the fishermen on the quay, than his “Muzzy” could have taught him in a hundred years. There was in particular one old, old man, wrinkled and weather-beaten, whose sole life’s business seemed to be to sit on a tar-barrel and smoke his pipe, except when he gave a hand to help pull in the fishing smacks as they came to shore laden with herring or mackerel. He was known in the place by the nickname of “Rattling Jack,”--and to him Boy would often go, and with half bold, half shy questions would draw him out to tell stories of the sea, though the old chap was not very fond of harking back to his past life and adventures, and generally preferred to expound short essays on the conduct of life, drawn from his long experience.

“Aye, there y’are,” he said on one occasion, when Boy, with some pride, brought for his inspection a beautiful rose-coloured sea-anemone which he had managed to detach from the rocks and carry off in his tin pail. “There y’are, you see! Now ye’ve made a fellow-creature miserable y’are as ’appy as the day is long! Eh, eh--why for mussy’s sake didn’t ye leave it on the rocks in the sun with the sea a-washin’ it an’ the blessin’ of the Lord A’mighty on it? They things are jes’ like human souls--there they stick on a rock o’ faith and hope maybe, jes’ wantin’ nothin’ but to be let alone; and then by-and-by some one comes along that begins to poke at ’em, and pull ’em about, and wake up all their sensitiveness-like--’urt ’em as much as possible, that’s the way!--and then they pulls ’em off their rocks and carries ’em off in a mean little tin pail! Ay, ay, ye may call a tin pail whatever ye please--a pile o’ money or a pile o’ love--it’s nought but a tin pail--not a rock with the sun shinin’ upon it. And o’ coorse they dies--there ain’t no sense in livin’ in a tin pail.”

These remarks being somewhat profound, were rather beyond Boy’s comprehension, but he gathered something of their sense and looked rather wistfully at his sea-trophy.

“Will it die now?” he asked anxiously.

“Av coorse it will! How’d you like to be off your own blessed rock, and squeeged into a pail? Come now, tell me that! Wouldn’t you kick the bucket over?--Hor--hor--hor!” and the old man laughed hoarsely at what he considered a bright and natural witticism--“an’ die an’ ’ave done with it?”

“I suppose I should,” answered Boy meditatively. “What do you do when you die?”

“I ain’t done it yet,” replied Rattling Jack rather testily. “But I expec’ when I ’ave to, I’ll do it as well as my betters--stretch out my legs, turn up my toes, shut up my eyes, chuckle-chuckle in my windpipe, and go slick off. There ain’t no particular style o’ doing it.”

Boy stood staring, limp with horror,--Rattling Jack had been so extremely realistic in his description--suiting the action to the word, and the word to the action,--and at the “chuckle-chuckle in my windpipe” he had made such an appalling noise that Boy felt it would be necessary to run for assistance. But the venerable gentleman soon recovered from his histrionic efforts, and refilling his pipe began stuffing the tobacco well into it with the point of an extremely dirty forefinger.

“Ay, ay, there y’are,” he went on. “Now wot are ye goin’ to be yerself when yer tries to knock up a riggin’ in this wide world? There bain’t no place for boys in this old country, but away wiz yer to ’Meriker and Canada. Ask yer father to send ye away to ’Meriker,--there’s a chance for ev’ry man to make a million there, an’ come back a reg’lar bounder. An’ then ye can marry one o’ they foine ladies wot’s all dress an’ no brains. Simper-simper--slish-slish!--ah, they makes me sick, they do! I tell yer,” here he turned angrily round upon the astonished boy, “I tell yer they makes me sick, they do! We don’t see a-many of ’em ’ere, the Lord be blessed for all ’is mussies, but if ever you goes to Lunnon----”

“I used to live in London,” murmured Boy apologetically.

Rattling Jack looked at him in a kind of dull wrath.

“You! You little shaver! Come from Lunnon, do yer? Well, wot in the world is yer doin’ ’ere? Now tell me that!” Here lighting his pipe he stuck it well between his yellow teeth, and turned round with a fish-like glare in his eye upon the small boy before him. “Wot are yer doin’ ’ere?” he repeated. “Come now, tell me that!”

Boy meditated, finally he said,--

“I’m very sorry I can’t tell you. I really don’t know.”

“Avast there!” said Rattling Jack. “A boy as don’t know where ’e is, nor wot ’e is, nor why ’e is, ain’t no good as I can see. Chuck it!”

Possibly it may have been from the consideration of these scathing remarks of Rattling Jack that Boy was moved one morning to ask his “Muzzy” a perplexing question, which has often presented itself as the profoundest of problems to most of the world’s metaphysicians.

“Mother, what am I?”

Mrs. D’Arcy-Muir, who had just settled herself comfortably in an arm-chair to hear him read aloud a short summary, prepared by herself, of some of the baldest and prosiest facts of our glorious English history, gazed at him with a bland smile.

“Don’t be silly, Boy!”

“I’m not silly,” he answered, with a touch of irritation. “I want to know what I really am--I mean, what is the good of me?”

“What is the good of you?” echoed “Muzzy,” nodding her large head abstractedly. “Are you not my son?”

“Yes, but I might have been anybody’s son, you see,” said Boy. “That isn’t it at all. I should like to know what I’m going to do with myself.”

“Of course you would,” replied his mother with comfortable composure. “Very natural, and very proper. But we can’t decide that just now. When you are older perhaps you shall go into the Navy.”

Boy’s face flushed, and his delicate brows contracted. His mother did not understand him. But he had found out that it was no use arguing with her.

“That’s not what I meant,” he said, and turned at once to his lessons in resigned patience.

It was strange, he thought, but inevitable, that no one could be found to tell him exactly what he wished most to learn. About God, for instance,--who was that Personage really? He was afraid to ask. He had been told that God had made him, and the world, and everything that was in the world, and he was accustomed to say a little form of prayer to this same God every night at bedtime, and every morning on rising--the servant Gerty at Hereford Square had taught him to do so, and his “Muzzy” had blandly approved of Gerty’s religious zeal. But he had no real conception as to Whom he was addressing himself. The sweet old story--the grand story of the selfless Christ, had been told him in a sort of vague and inconsequent manner, but he had not understood it a bit. One of his petitions to Heaven, invented by Gerty, ran thus,--“Dear Jesus, bless father, bless mother, make me a good boy, and save my soul for Heaven, Amen!” But he had no sort of idea what his “soul” was, or why it should be so carefully “saved for Heaven.” What was the good of his soul? And what was Heaven? Often he thought he would ask Rattling Jack,--but he hesitated to do so lest that venerable cynic should empty vials of wrath on his defenceless head for being in such a state of ignorance. And so the days went on, and he was fast becoming used to the companionship of the boy-scavengers on the beach, and the conversation of Rattling Jack, when a sudden and glorious break occurred in the clouds of his dull sky. Major Desmond came down from London unexpectedly to see his father and mother, and to ask that he might be allowed to go to Scotland and stay a whole month with Miss Leslie, at a beautiful place she had taken there for the summer on the fairy shores of Loch Katrine. He was amusing himself by the sea as usual, putting helpless baby-crabs into a glass bottle, when his mother’s maid-of-all-work came hurrying down to find him, and seizing him suddenly by the arm, upset the whole crab family all over the sand. But Boy made no remark of either anger or sorrow as he saw his crawling collection scattered in all directions,--they were not the only crabs, he reflected philosophically--there were a good many more in the sea. And when he heard that Major Desmond was waiting to see him, he was very glad, though as a matter of fact he was not quite sure who Major Desmond was, except that he was associated in his mind with an old magic lantern which had fallen out of repair, and was shut up in a cupboard with the worn-out boots of the household. He ran, however, as fast as his little wiry legs would carry him, moved by curiosity and an eagerness that he could not well explain, but made conscious, by the outcoming aura of pleasurable sensations, that something agreeable was about to happen. He forgot that he was dirty and untidy,--he did not know that he looked neglected--so that he was utterly unaware of the reasons which caused the well-dressed, handsome, burly old gentleman, with the white moustache, to recoil a step or two at sight of him, and exclaim, “Oh Lord!” accompanying the ejaculation with a low whistle. Major Desmond?--of course he remembered him now!--he was the friend of that far-off vision of his childhood, “Kiss-Letty.” And rising memories began to send the colour to his face, and the sparkle to his eyes, and the tremulous curve to his lips, as he held out his grimy little hand and said somewhat nervously,--

“How do you do, Major? Has Miss Letty come too?”

The Major recovered from the shock of dismay with which he had at first contemplated the little sea-ragamuffin--and as he caught the look and smile with which Boy accompanied his question he began to breathe again.

“No, she has not come,” he replied, taking a grip of Boy’s thin shoulder with his strong yet gentle hand. “She is in Scotland. I am going over there to shoot. And I want to take you with me if your mother will let you come. How would you like to go, eh?”

Boy remained speechless. He could really have cried for joy at the idea--but he had learnt to control his emotions. One of the special “points” of his mother’s character was the maternal delight she had in refusing him any very special relaxation--she judged that as “discipline,” and used to say it was “a mother’s duty” to see that “her son” was not spoilt. So remembering this in time, he only smiled and was silent. Mrs. D’Arcy-Muir, looking narrowly at him, smiled also, condescendingly and complacently.

“Dear Boy! He doesn’t want to leave me,” she said, reverting to her old idea that she had made herself an absolute necessity to his comfort and happiness. “But I really think--yes--I think I should like him to go with you, Major. A little change will do him good--he is growing so fast----”

“Yes, by Jove he is!” agreed Desmond, looking at the little fellow with a doubtful air; “and getting jolly thin on it too! What do you feed him on, eh? Oh, never mind, we won’t go into it if you’d rather not. A little knocking round in the heather won’t hurt him. Well, ma’am, if you’re agreeable I can take him at once--we can reach London this evening and take the mail train up to-morrow.”

And so with few words, to Boy’s complete amazement, it was all settled. He was told to go and get washed and dressed, and the good-natured maid-of-all-work hearing these instructions, came to him in his little room and scrubbed him down, and helped him into his only decent suit of clothes, still of the “Jack Tar” pattern, and made by a country tailor. The country tailor was the only one who had fitted Boy properly; all his other clothes were stitched together loosely by Mrs. D’Arcy-Muir, who had “designed” them, as she said with much pride, and “cut” them, alas! on the following of those designs. A few little shirts and socks were crammed hastily into the very portmanteau Major Desmond had given him so long ago, and the maid-of-all-work perceiving a loose box of toys in a corner, containing she knew not what, put that in also--“for,” she muttered to herself, “they’ll amuse him on a rainy day, and I’ve heard it always rains in Scotland.” And so before he had time almost to look round, he had said good-bye to his mother,--his father was at the public-house and it was not worth while sending for him,--and was in the train with the Major sitting opposite to him--yes, there they were, flying, rushing, flying along to London at the rate of fifty miles an hour. He could hardly believe it; his head was quite confused with the hurry and surprise of it. He felt a little shy too, and afraid; the pretty confidence of his early days had quite disappeared. He peeped up every now and then at the Major, and the Major in turn, over the edge of a newspaper, peeped at him.

“By Jove, how the poor little beggar has been allowed to run wild!” thought the good-natured gentleman, whom the passing of years had made more good-natured than ever. “Looks like a ragged wastrel!” Aloud he said, “Boy, old chap, do you know what I’m going to do with you when we get to town?”

Boy smiled trustfully, because the Major looked so cheerful.

“No,” he said. “You tell me!”

“I’m going to put you in a mild Turkish bath,” pursued the Major. “Know what that is?”

“No!” and Boy laughed.

“Thought not! Well, you’ll know before you go to bed!”

Then came a silence, while the Major read his paper and the train rushed on,--and Boy began thinking, or rather trying to think over the rapid and amazing events of the day.

“I wish I’d said good-bye to Rattling Jack,” he remarked suddenly.

“Oh, do you? And who the deuce is ‘Rattling Jack?’” enquired the Major.

“He is just an old man,” replied Boy--“oh, very old! But he is a good talker and he amuses me often. He has seen a great deal of life.”

At this observation Major Desmond folded up his newspaper, laid it flat on his knee with a bang, and stared hard. “Seen a great deal of life!” What an old-fashioned, weird, and preoccupied look the little fellow had, to be sure! And how thin he was, and brown! What would Miss Letty say of him when she saw him? Would she be glad she had not been able to adopt him, or would she be sorry? These thoughts passed like small lightning flashes over the Major’s brain, and he gave a short impatient sigh. But so far as he was personally concerned he meant to make the best of it all, and on arriving in London that night he not only fulfilled his intention of seeing Boy through a Turkish bath, but he also took him to a tailor’s establishment famous for ready-made clothing, and “rigged him out,” as he termed it, with everything that was necessary for the son of a gentleman. And Boy slept soundly in the little room assigned to him at the Major’s bachelor flat,--his little limbs, lately encrusted with sea-salt that had almost baked itself into his tender flesh, were soothed and softened and rested by the rubbing and polishing he had received at the Turkish bath,--a rubbing and polishing which by-the-bye he had found intensely amusing and delightful, and he slipped into his new little flannel nightgown with a sense of ease and rest and light-heartedness that he had not felt for many a long day. And in his sleep something that had seemed hard and unchildish in him rolled away for the time being, for when he got up the next morning and put on his smart little grey travelling suit and cap to match, and his gold curls, rather short, but washed free of the sea-iodine, were glistening with something of their old brightness over his forehead, he looked more like the “Boy” of his babyhood than he had done for months. He was himself conscious of an alteration in his feelings,--Rattling Jack and his scavenger friends had all glided away like a bad dream or a picture painted on a vanishing screen,--his smiles came easily,--his step was brisk and light,--and while at breakfast with the Major, his laugh rang out with almost as much sweetness and freedom as in the old chuckling days of his affection for “Kiss-Letty.” And then, when they started for the north by the terrible train known as the “Flying Scotchman,” what joy!--what excitement!--what novelty! There was the jolly guard with the strongest of Highland accents--what a splendid fellow he was to be sure! Then there was the other man with the polite countenance and the gold buttons on his coat, who came round respectfully to take orders for luncheon-baskets _en route_,--he was a very agreeable person too, especially when luncheon-time came and the basket with it. Then there were the wonderful picture-papers with which the Major provided him, together with a fascinating little hamper of fruit, and a box of the finest chocolate. What a heavenly journey!--what an almost inspired “rush” it was from London to Edinburgh--a flight as of the gods! And when Edinburgh was reached, and the Major did not stop there, but took another train on to a place called Callander, where Miss Leslie’s elegant landau awaited them, there followed a drive like a dream through scenery that was surely as beautiful as any fabled fairy-land. Crown upon crown of deep purple hills stretched softly away into the evening distance of a golden sky as clear as amber,--glorious trees nodding drowsily under a weight of clustering scarlet berries--trees which the Major told him were called rowans in Scotland and mountain-ash in England,--tufts and hillocks of heather almost blazing like fire in the after-glow of the set sun--and a sweet mysterious noise of rippling water everywhere--the noise of falling “burnies” leaping from rocky heights, and trickling down into deep recesses of coolness and shadow fringed with bracken and fern. And then the first glimpse of Loch Katrine! That exquisite turn of the road which charms the dullest spectator after passing the Trossachs Hotel,--with Ellen’s Isle standing like a jewel on the shining breast of the peaceful water! Boy’s long pent-up love of the beautiful found vent here in a cry of ecstacy, and he stood up on the seat of the carriage to take in the whole of the matchless panorama. His eyes sparkled,--his little face shone with joy and animation; and seeing how he had almost smiled himself into the real child he was again, the kindly Major was more satisfied, and did not feel so much nervous dread of what Miss Letty might say, when the carriage turned suddenly round into a fine avenue of silvery birches and pine, and bowled up to the door of a long wide house, covered with roses, and set on a terrace overlooking the Loch, where stood the gentle lady upon whom the passing of time had scarcely left a perceptible trace--Miss Letty, as serene and graceful as ever, with the same beneficent look of welcome and soft dove-like glance of eye. At sight of her, Boy let himself go altogether, and flinging reserve and timidity to the winds sprang into her ready arms, and hugged her tight, with a strong inclination to cry, so deeply was he excited. Miss Letty was no less moved as she tenderly embraced him, and it took her a minute or two to conquer her emotion. Then she said,--

“Dear Boy! I am so glad to see you! How you have grown!”

Boy laughed sheepishly and shamefacedly. How he had grown indeed! It seemed quite a mistake to have done it. Why could he not always have stayed a little child and looked at “booful pick-shures” with “Kiss Letty”? And indeed no matter how much we are bound to believe in the wise ordainments of a sublime and perfect Providence, we may ask whether for many a child it would not have been happiest never to have grown up at all. Honestly speaking, we cannot grieve for the fair legions of beloved children who have passed away in their childhood,--we know, even without the aid of Gospel comfort, that it is “far better” with them so. If Boy had been an analyst of feeling he would have known that deep in his sensitive consciousness there was a faint regret that he had even become so old as nine years. It was the first pulsation of that much crueller sense of loss and error which sometimes affects the full-grown man, when looking back to the bygone days of his youth. But Boy, though he was beginning to take himself into his own confidence, and to consider carefully the results of giving way to emotion, had not proceeded so far as to understand all the fine breathings of variable thought that stirred his brain cells as the wind stirs ripples on a pool; he only knew that just now he was both very glad and very sorry--very glad to be again with “Kiss Letty,” very sorry to have “grown” so much as to be somewhat more removed from her than in former time. He hung affectionately on her arm though now, as they went into the house together,--and a sense of “home sweet home” gave his step lightness and his eyes a clear sparkle, as he passed through the pretty hall, adorned in Scottish fashion with great stag antlers and deer heads, and bright clusters of heather and scarlet rowans set on the table as well as in every corner where a touch of colour or brightness seemed necessary,--and then up the broad, softly carpeted stairs to the delightful room which had been prepared for him--a room with a wide window commanding a glorious view of almost the whole glittering expanse of Loch Katrine. And here Margaret awaited him--Margaret, as comely and tidy as of old, with her kind face and spotless apron,--Margaret, who met him with almost the same exclamation as Miss Letty though tuned in different words.

“Bless the lad! How he has grown, to be sure!”

And again he blushed and smiled, and looked sheepish, and felt happy and sad at once. But Margaret soon found out to his comfort and her own that he was not so advanced in years and knowledge after all,--that he had but slipshod notions as to the manner of washing his hands, and was apt to perform that cleansing business in a very limp and halfhearted fashion. Likewise he had little or no idea as to how he should brush and comb his curly hair,--and it was greatly to Margaret’s delight that she found her services could not be quite dispensed with. She began at once to “arrange” him according to her own particular way of “valeting” a small boy, and presently turned him out to her entire satisfaction in a becoming white flannel suit,--one of the halfdozen Major Desmond had bought him on the way through London,--with a soft blue tie knotted under his little open collar, and the bright waves of his hair disposed to the best advantage. Very sweet and very wistful too the little fellow looked as he then went down to dinner; and Miss Letty’s eyes grew dim with a sudden moisture, as she glanced at him from time to time and noticed, as only a loving woman can, the slight indefinable alterations in him, which, like the faintly pencilled lines in a drawing, were bound to become darker, and gradually to take their place in the whole composition of his life and character. Major Desmond had told her exactly the condition in which he had found him, and as she heard, her heart grew heavy and sore. Why, she thought, if his parents were going to do no more than allow him to run wild among the common boys of a village sea-shore, could they not have given him the chance she had offered? She said something to this effect in half a dozen words to her old friend Dick, who, with a puzzled tug at his white moustache and a shrug of his broad shoulders, gave the matter up as a sort of difficult conundrum.

“But it’s the mother, Letty,--it’s the soft, fat, absurdly self-important mother!” he declared. “Tell you what, Jim D’Arcy-Muir, besotted with drink as he is, knows he is a beast, and that is a great point in his favour. When a man knows he is a beast and admits it, you can give him credit for honesty if for nothing else; and Jim, I firmly believe, would hand you over the little chap at once, and be glad enough to give him such a jolly good start in life. But Mrs. D’Arcy-Muir--there!--she’s a beast too and she doesn’t know it, which makes all the difference. She’s not a beast in drinking--no--but she’s a beast in her sloth and love of muddle and dirt and confusion, and worse than a beast in stupid obstinacy. No one can do anything with her. She will always be a drag on Boy’s wheel!”

“His mother?” suggested Miss Leslie gently.

“Yes, I know. She’s his mother, more’s the pity. The days are coming when he will despise his mother--and that is a very bad look-out for any chap. But it will not be his fault--it will be hers.”

Miss Leslie said no more on the subject just then,--she had Boy at any rate for a month to herself, and she resolved to watch him closely and study his character for herself.

She began a close and tender observation of him,--his manners, his little quaint ways of speech,--and for the first week of his stay with her she noticed nothing to awaken her anxiety. The change from his “scavenger” life on the sea-shore to the elegance and refinement of Miss Letty’s home, combined with the beauty and freshness of an open-air existence in the Scottish Highlands, gave Boy for the time a happy oblivion of all his recent sordid experiences. Fishing, boating, climbing, and riding on a lovable little Shetland pony which his kind hostess had bought for his use--these new and delightful pastimes, so enjoyable to healthy childhood, were all his to try in turn,--and whether he was rushing like a little madcap to the top of a convenient hill to catch a first sight of Major Desmond as he came down from the higher moors with the rest of the shooting-party,--or whether he was helping Miss Letty gather great picturesque bunches of bracken and rowan branches in the woods for the decoration of the house, Boy was unthinkingly and unquestioningly happy. Winsome and bright, he behaved like the real child he truly was in years; he had no time to go away by himself into little corners and think, for there was a boy named Alister McDonald, two years older than himself, who struck up a friendship with him, and had no sort of idea of leaving him alone. This same Alister was a terrible person. He too was an only son,--but his father, Colonel McDonald, was not a “Poo Sing,” but a very fine specimen of a gentleman at his best. He and his wife, a woman of bright disposition and sweet character, had brought up their boy to love all things bold, manly, and true--and Alister had developed the bold and manly by doing everything in the world that could risk his life and get him into a pickle--and his present way of serving the Cause of Truth was to go and tell everything to his mother. The very first day he made acquaintance with Boy, he stuck his small hands in his small trouser pockets and remarked airily,--

“I suppose you’re game for any sort of a lark, ain’t you?”

“I suppose I am!” Boy answered, with a touch of reserved assurance.

“All right! Then we’ll be pals!” Alister had answered, and to prove his sincerity, took Boy at once in charge, and escorted him straight away to a mysterious salmon-pool, where, trying to angle with a long willow wand, a bit of string, and a just killed wasp instead of the orthodox fly, they both very nearly fell in and made an end of their lives. To be the hero of hairbreadth escapes suited Alister perfectly. He always had some dark scheme in his mind--some new plan for generally alarming and exciting the neighbourhood. But as a matter of fact all the people in the place had got pretty well used to the endless scrapes of “Maister Alister” as they called him, and even his mother, whose nerves had undergone many a severe trial concerning the delinquencies of her only darling, had now become more or less resigned to the inevitable. Two or three days of each other’s society were enough to make Boy and Alister inseparables,--and many a hearty roar of laughter did their strange adventures on hill and moor, by stream and loch, cause Major Desmond and his sporting friends,--while kind Miss Letty, with two or three other pleasant ladies who were her guests, laughed with them, and quickly forgave the little truants all their mischief.

One day there came a pause in the merriment,--the heroic Alister was seized with a raging toothache, a malady which might even upset the calm of an Ajax. There was nothing for it but to have the worrying tooth pulled out, whereupon Alister’s mother took him to Edinburgh for the necessary operation. It was a dull, cloudy sort of day,--rain had set in early in the morning, and a furious gust of wind swept the fair waters of Loch Katrine, and bent the silvery birches to and fro till they presented the weird aspect of shivering white ghosts, stooping to bathe their long tresses in the waters, and anon lifting themselves again in attitudes as it seemed of wild despair at the pitiless storm. There was no possibility of either walking or driving or boating, and Alister being away, Boy was rather at a loss what to do with himself. Miss Letty saw him looking a little wistful and wearied, and at once took him in hand herself. Putting her arm around him she said,--

“What shall we do to amuse ourselves, Boy?”

Boy smiled faintly.

“I don’t know!” he said.

“Do you like pictures as much as you used to do?”

Boy hesitated.

“Some!” he said dubiously. “Not all!”

“Did you bring your magic lantern with you?”

Boy opened his eyes wide.

“Oh no! That’s all gone to pieces long ago!”

Miss Letty made no comment on the magic lantern’s destruction.

“Well, let’s ask Margaret what there is among your things to amuse ourselves with,” she said cheerily. “All sorts of odds and ends were packed with your clothes!”

“Were there?” said Boy. “Mother didn’t pack them--it was the servant.”

Again Miss Letty made no comment, and Boy holding her by the arm went with her to Margaret, who, on being questioned, smiled, and opened a cupboard full of curious-looking objects.

“They’re all more or less broken, my leddy!” she said. “But the Cow is here as good as it ever was!”

“The Cow!” and Miss Letty laughed, but a little moisture suffused her eyes.

Boy looked at her questioningly.

“What’s the Cow?” he asked.

“Ah, darling, you have grown to be such a little man now that you don’t remember the poor Cow!” said Miss Letty half laughingly, half sadly. “Where is it, Margaret?”

Margaret selected it from the heap in the cupboard, and gave it gingerly into the hand of her mistress--the same wise-looking quadruped, with its movable head wagging as faithfully as ever.

Boy looked at it with a smile that was almost derisive.

“That a Cow!” he said.

“Yes,” said Miss Letty, “and you thought it a very nice Cow when you were a little child. But you have grown so big now--though you are only nine years old. Oh, don’t you remember!--you used to call it ‘Dunny’?”

Boy’s face brightened with a sudden look of recognition.

“Oh, yes! I remember now!” he said, and he gave a fillip with his finger to the head of the despised “Dunny” to set it wagging faster. “That was when I was quite a baby!”

“Yes,” said Miss Leslie, sorrowfully, “when you were quite a baby!”

She held the Cow in her hand tenderly--she would not put it back among the broken toys. But she said no more about it just then. The only thing they found among the mass of rubbish which had been thrust into Boy’s portmanteau so hastily by his mother’s maid-of-all-work was a German War-game, which Boy proposed to play with Miss Letty.

She acceded, and together they went down to her own boudoir, where she placed “Dunny” on a little bracket above her writing-desk, and then applied herself to master the game of killing as per German military tactics. Boy proved himself an extraordinary adept at this mechanical warfare, and won all along as triumphantly as if he had been the Kaiser himself. Indeed, he showed an extraordinary amount of cunning, which, though clever, was not altogether as lovable and childlike as Miss Letty in her simplicity of soul could have wished. There was a vague discomfort in her mind as she allowed herself to be ignominiously beaten. For though the game was only a game, it had its fixed rules like every other, and Miss Letty was sorely worried by the fancy--it was only a fancy--that Boy had been trying to “cheat” in a peculiarly adroit fashion. She would not allow herself to dwell upon the point, however, and when she put away the game, and took him to tea in the drawing-room, where two of the ladies staying in the house were sitting with their needlework, and listening to the howling wind and gusty rain, she gave him a little chair by the side of the bright fire, which was necessary on such a chilly day in Scotland, and let him talk as he liked, and generally express his sentiments. For some time he was very silent, contenting himself with tea-cake and scones, and only occasionally remarking on the absence of Alister McDonald, and the suffering he was perhaps undergoing with his tooth; but after a bit he began to ask questions, and unburden his mind on sundry matters, encouraged thereto by one of the ladies present, who was interested by his winsome face, clear eyes, and light, trim little figure.

“What are you going to be when you are a man?” she asked.

Boy considered.

“A man is a long way off,” he answered gravely. “And, you see, you can never tell what may happen! Dads is a man. But he isn’t anything.”

“He’s an officer in the Army, dear,” corrected Miss Letty gently: “a retired officer,--but still an officer.”

“What is the good of being an officer if you retire before you ever fight?” asked Boy.

All the ladies smiled, but volunteered no answer.

“You see it wouldn’t be any use,” went on Boy reflectively. “I shouldn’t care to have to learn how to fight if I wasn’t ever wanted to do it. I think I’d rather be like Rattling Jack!”

“Who on earth is ‘Rattling Jack’?” asked the youngest lady present, suppressing a laugh.

“He is an old man at home,” explained Boy. “He used to be on a merchant vessel, trading to India, Japan, and China, and all that, and he says he has seen nearly the whole world. People say he’s got a lot of money hidden away in his mattress--and that when he was in Ceylon he managed to steal a ruby worth ten thousand pounds! Fancy! Wasn’t that clever of him? And he’s got it still!”

“Then he’s a thief!” said Miss Letty, trying to look severe. “It isn’t at all clever to steal. It’s very wicked! He must be a bad man!”

“Yes, I suppose he is,” said Boy with a little sigh. “But of course the person from whom he stole the ruby ought to have come after him. But he never did. So that was lucky! And some people say it’s only a bit of red glass he’s got!”

“Whatever it is, a bit of glass or a ruby, he had no business to steal it!” said Miss Letty.

“Oh, but he hasn’t been found out,” answered Boy. “And he doesn’t mind telling people he’s got it!”

There was a pause. Miss Letty was a trifle vexed,--the other two ladies were merely amused.

“I’ll tell you another thing about him,” said Boy, suddenly warming into confidence. “He buys things off us!”

They all laughed outright.

“Buys things off us!” exclaimed Miss Letty. “Oh, Boy dear, what do you mean?”

“Well, you see, all along the shore there are the most curious things washed in from the sea,” said Boy--“silver spoons and forks, and penknives, and boxes, and sometimes money. Just before I came away I found a gold bracelet in the sand, and Rattling Jack gave me one-and-sixpence for it, and he had it cleaned, and it was solid gold, and he sold it for three pounds. Wasn’t that clever of him?”

Again the laughter broke out, but Miss Letty sighed.

“I don’t think ‘Rattling Jack’ is quite a nice person for you to talk to,” she said. “Does your mother know anything about him?”

“Oh, no! Mother doesn’t know anybody!” answered Boy candidly. “I make my own friends!”

“Well, we don’t want you to be a Rattling Jack!” said the young lady who had before spoken. “We want you to be a brave, honest man, and a gentleman! You must try for the Navy--not the Merchant Navy, but the regular fighting Navy--the Queen’s Navy!”

“Yes--but you never get higher than ‘Admiral’ there!” said Boy, with a matter-of-fact cynicism. “Rattling Jack told me that was just an honour without sufficient pay to keep it up. It isn’t worth working for, I fancy!”

“My dear Boy!” exclaimed Miss Letty, distressed. “Not worth working for! How did you get such ideas in your head? What _is_ worth working for?”

“Oh, I don’t know!” said Boy. “Not much, I expect. All you can do is to amuse yourself, and you want lots of money for that!”

The pained expression deepened on Miss Letty’s sweet old face, but she could say nothing just then, as a diversion was created by the sudden bouncing entrance of Alister McDonald, accompanied by his mother, both damp with rain, but both with glowing cheeks and sparkling eyes, back from Edinburgh, and fresh from their drive through the storm from the Callander station.

“Please excuse us!” laughed Mrs. McDonald. “But we thought you might be having tea about this time, so we risked coming in!”

Miss Leslie welcomed them heartily, with the unaffected sincerity which was her great charm, and ordered fresh tea and scones; while Alister, drawing Boy aside, related to him with graphic picturesqueness of detail his thrilling experiences at the dentist’s.

“He said, would I have gas? I said, what is gas? And mother said it was a stuff you took through a tube, and you went off stiff and silly, and didn’t know what was going on! And I said no, I wouldn’t have gas. I liked to know what was being done to me anyhow! ‘It will hurt you, sir,’ said he. I said ‘All right; it hurts now.’ ‘Sit in this chair,’ he said, ‘and keep still.’ I sat in a big chair with a sort of iron swivel on to it, and I laid my head back, and opened my mouth wide. And he looked in. And I thought of the execution of Charles the First! Then he said, ‘Now, sir, steady!’ Then I shut my eyes and repeated in my head,

The boy stood on the burning deck, When all but him had fled!

and before I got to ‘fled’ out came the tooth with a big prong at the end. And I never cried. And he said to me, ‘Did it hurt you?’ ‘Not a bit,’ said I. But of course it did. Only he wasn’t going to crow over me--not if I knew it! And he didn’t. He looked pretty small, I can tell you, with that tooth in his nippers. My! What scones! Such a jolly lot of butter!” And his conversation terminated abruptly in a huge bite of the succulent material offered to him by one of the ladies already on duty to attend his budding masculinity.

Boy watched him enjoying his tea with wonder and a touch of envy. He too would have bidden defiance to the terrors of the dentist as carelessly as Alister, but it would have been out of sheer indifference, not combativeness. Here was the contrast between the temperaments of the two boys, and a very serious contrast it was. The slight affair of Alister’s tooth was a test of character. Boy would have gone through the painful ordeal with quiet stoicism because he would not have considered it worth while to do otherwise,--Alister went through it with the idea that somehow or other he was more than a match for the dentist. Herein was the varying quality of environment which would make of the one boy a warm-blooded, courageous man, and of the other perhaps a languid cynic. Young as the children were, any close student of human nature could trace the diverging possibilities of each mind already, and the uncomfortable little pang at Miss Letty’s heart was not hurting her without some cause. However, she was not of a morose or morbid disposition, and she would not allow herself to give way to these first premonitions of doubt as to Boy’s development. She resolved to make one more effort to rescue him from his uncouth home surroundings, and meanwhile she contented herself with letting him enjoy his holiday as much as possible, and giving him all the liberty he seemed to need.

One day, however, there occurred a grand catastrophe. Major Desmond had left his gun in the hall, with express orders that it was not to be touched. But just about an hour before dinner there was the sound of a tremendous explosion, and a crash of glass,--and on a contingent of the household running to see what was the matter, lo! there was the Major’s gun in the same place and position, but a charge was missing, and one of the windows in the hall was shivered to atoms. The Major had a temper, and he lost it for the immediate moment.

“Now, who has done this?” he shouted. “Didn’t I give express orders that my gun was to be left alone! By Jove, whoever has been meddling with it ought to have a sound thrashing! Might have killed somebody, besides breaking windows! Come now! Who did it?”

There was nobody to answer. The servants were all at a loss,--Boy and Alister were out in the grounds, so it was said,--no one had touched the gun,--it must have gone off by itself.

“D----d nonsense!” roared the Major, forgetting the presence of Miss Leslie, who stood looking at the broken window in perplexity,--“I put the gun up in a safe corner out of harm’s way. If it had gone off by itself the charge would have lodged in the ceiling, not through the window. I am not such an ass as not to see that! Some one has been playing pranks with it! Where’s Boy?”

“Oh, Boy wouldn’t touch it,” protested Miss Letty, “I’m sure he wouldn’t!”

“Well, where is he?” persisted the Major: “he may know something about it!” and marching outside the door he called, “Boy!” in a voice strong enough to awaken all the fabled sleeping giants of the hills.

Boy answered the call with quite an amazing promptitude.

“Yes, Major!”

The Major stared.

“Where did you come from so suddenly?” he demanded. “You young rascal! You have been meddling with my gun!”

“I’m sure I haven’t!” replied Boy coolly.

“Then who has?”

“How can I tell?” said Boy, with airy indifference.

“Boy!”

“Yes, sir?”

“Look at me straight!”

Boy obeyed. The clear eyes met the Major’s stare without flinching.

“You swear on your honour--now, sir, remember! I am a soldier, and ‘on your honour’ is a very serious thing to say--swear on your honour that you never touched that gun!”

Boy hesitated--just a second’s pause. And suddenly a high piping voice called out,--

“Own up, Boy! Own up! Don’t be caddish!”

Boy flushed crimson to the roots of his fair curls, and cast down his eyes. He had no occasion to speak. The Major’s face grew grave and stern.

“You may go, sir!”

“Oh, Boy!”

The cry came from Miss Letty, and Boy tried to shuffle past without looking at her, but she caught him by the arm.

“Boy,” she said, her sweet voice shaking with suppressed excitement, “how could you tell a lie?”

He stopped--uneasily shifting one foot against the other, and keeping his eyes cast down. She stretched out her soft, kind little hand.

“Come with me,” she continued. “Come and talk to me alone, and tell me why you were so wicked, and then we will go and ask the Major’s pardon.”

She looked at him steadily. And her sweet face, and tender eyes full of tears, were more than the child’s unnatural stoicism could bear. His little chest heaved--his lips quivered.

“I---- I----” and he got no further, but broke down in a wild fit of sobbing. Miss Letty put her arm round him, and gently led him away. The Major, who had stood grim and rigid in the hall, watched her go, and coughed fiercely, unaware that the ubiquitous Alister McDonald was standing on the threshold of the hall where the little scene had taken place, and was watching him inquisitively, with his little hands in his little trouser pockets as usual.

“Hullo, Major!” said this imp: “Don’t _you_ cry!”

“Eh--what? Cry! Me! God bless my soul! Go to---- the North Pole with you!” snapped out the Major irascibly. “What business have you here, sir, staring at me?”

“Oh, come now, I say,” returned the unabashed Alister. “Don’t be raspy! I suppose I can look at you as well as anybody else, can’t I? I like looking at you!”

The Major gave a short laugh.

“Oh, you do, do you!” he returned. “Much obliged to you, I’m sure!”

He coughed again, laughed, chuckled--and then settled his features into gravity.

“Now, look here, you scamp,” he said, resting his big hand on Alister’s small shoulder: “How did it happen?”

“Well, we were playing soldiers,” explained Alister, “and I was the Britisher, and he was the Britisher’s enemy. He was half starved, and he had to get behind an entrenchment. The entrenchment was the hall, and he was in a terrible way, because you see he had no water, no food, and he was run down with fever and ague. You see, I was the well-fed Britisher, and I had everybody looking after me, and all the world watching what I was going to do,--and I had prayers put up for me in all the churches, and he was only a savage and a brother. But he said, ‘I have got a way to surprise you,’ said he, and he turned a somersault, and he said, ‘Yah!’ as savages do, you know,--and he ran behind his entrenchment (the hall door), and just without thinking took up the gun and fired it through the window. I was lying low, waiting attack, and I was nearly killed--not quite--and then he was frightened, and ran out, and he said, ‘We’ll be brothers,’ and we hid in ambush, and then you called----”

“Yes, that’s all very well!” said the Major, suppressing his strong desire to grin at this account of warfare; “But why did he tell a lie?”

“Oh, I suppose because he was the enemy!” replied Alister calmly. “You see, in the camp he had nobody watching him, and no churches to pray for him,--he was only a savage! I expect that’s what it was!”

The Major looked reflective.

“Well, now you had better go away home,” he said. “There’ll be no more fighting or games between Christian brotherhoods to-day. Boy will have to be punished.”

Alister’s small face became exceedingly serious.

“I say, don’t be hard on him!” he said, expostulatingly. “He’s such a little chap!”

The Major preserved his solemnity.

“He’s only two years younger than you are--quite old enough to know how to tell the truth!”

“Has he got a mother?” asked Alister.

“Yes.”

“Well, you see, she isn’t here, and he can’t go and ask her about it, so perhaps he got a bit muddled like. I hope you will let him down easy!”

The Major bit his lips under his fuzzy white moustache, to hide the smile that threatened to break into a roar of laughter, as the young gentleman, after giving expression to these sentiments, sauntered off somewhat dejectedly; and then, turning into the house, put away the gun that had been the cause of all the mischief, and went round to the stables to devise some means of stuffing up the broken window in the hall for the night. And his thoughts were touched with sorrow as well as pity.

“Unfortunate little chap!” he muttered. “Once let him take to lying, and he is done for. All the Lettys in the world could not save him. I wonder now how the devil he came to begin it? It is not his first lie--he did it too well, and looked too cool for it. I should like to know how he began!”

And this was just what Miss Letty was finding out, bit by bit, as she sat in her own quiet room with Boy on her knee clasped in her arms, and talking to him gently. She heard all about his life on the sea-shore, and the little scavengers he met there who had taught him how clever it was to “do” people, and to cheat, and generally mislead and deceive the simple and unsuspecting,--and as she listened to the strange moral axioms he had picked up, and gradually gathered from him as he talked some idea of the lonely life he led, uncared for and untaught, save in the most superficial and slipshod fashion, her heart warmed to him more and more with an almost painful tenderness, and when with a short sigh he paused in his disjointed narrative, the tears were heavy in her eyes. She set him gently down from her knee and kissed him.

“We’ll say no more about it, Boy,” she whispered. “Run to the Major and tell him you are very sorry, and that you will never tell a lie again.”

Boy hesitated a moment. Then, impulsively throwing his arms round her neck and kissing her, he ran quickly away. He found the Major in the billiardroom reading his newspaper and smoking, and went straight up to him,

“I’m very sorry, sir,” he faltered.

Major Desmond laid down his paper and looked at him full in the face, with the straight steel-blue eyes that had in them as much command as tenderness.

“Sorry for what?” he demanded,--“For touching the gun, or for telling a lie?”

Boy’s heart swelled, and his eyes were misty and aching.

“For both, sir,” he said.

The Major held out his hand, and Boy laid his own little trembling hot fingers in that cool clean palm.

“That’s right!” said Desmond: “Disobedience is bad, but a lie is worse,--don’t do either! Is that agreed?”

“Yes, sir!”

Boy answered bravely enough, but his spirit sank as he thought that if he never disobeyed, his obedience, instead of a virtue, would oblige him to do the most foolish and unnecessary things under his mother’s orders,--and if he never told a lie, his hours of freedom and play would be considerably if not altogether curtailed, and he would be made the poor little peg on which his parents would hang their many quarrels and discussions. The Major noticed the touch of hesitation in his answer as well as in his manner, and did not like it. But he repressed his own forebodings, and smiled cheerily down upon the small forlorn lad in whom lay the budding promise of a man who might, or might not, be fit for good fighting in the combat of life.

“When you are bigger and stronger I’ll show you how to handle a gun,” he said,--“At present you are too small a chap. You would blow yourself into bits as easily as you blew out the hall window. Now come along with me and I’ll show you the birds we got to-day.”

He strode out into the grounds, and Boy followed him with an odd mixture of feeling. Sorrow and shame, united to wonder and scorn, put him into a mental condition not easy to explain. To his childish mind it seemed difficult to understand why Major Desmond and Miss Letty should be such straight, honest, sober folk, and his own father and mother such shiftless, indifferent, careless people.

“They don’t seem to see that a boy can’t do just as well with a father who doesn’t care about him, as he could with a father who does!” he mused. “I suppose I’m bound to be a lonely boy!”

And he trotted on in silence beside the Major, and looked at the beautiful shot grouse and blackcock, and was very attentive and docile and respectful, and the Major felt a twinge of pain in his good heart as he realized that Boy had plenty of material in him for the making of worthy manhood, material which was being thrown away for want of proper management and training. He confided his feelings on this subject to Miss Leslie that night, in the company of a brother officer, some years younger than himself, who had few joys left in life save the love of sport and a good game of chess or billiards. Captain Fitzgerald Crosby--or “Fitz” as he was generally called--was a fine, upright personage, with a most alarmingly grim and rigid cast of countenance which rather repelled timid people on first introduction. He was “a cross-looking old boor” with all the ladies until he smiled. Then such a radiance played in his quiet grey eyes, and such a kindness softened the lines of his mouth and smoothed away the furrows of his brows, that he was voted a “darling” instantly. On this occasion, when Major Desmond started off expatiating on the waste of Boy’s life, and Miss Letty paused in her knitting, listening to his remarks with sorrowful attention, Fitz looked particularly glum handling his billiard cue thoughtfully, and staring at its point as though it were a magic wand to conjure with.

“There’s a good deal of waste everywhere, it seems to me,” he said slowly. “The scientific fellows tell us that nothing is wasted in the way of matter,--every grain of dust and every drop of dew has got its own special business, and is of special use; but upon my word, when you come to think of the finer things--love and hope and goodness and charity and all the rest of it, it seems nothing but waste all along. There’s a great waste of love especially!”

The Major coughed, and hit a ball viciously.

“Yes, there’s a great waste of love,” went on the unheeding and still gloomily frowning Fitz. “We set our hearts on a thing, and it’s immediately taken from us,--we work all our days for a promising son or a favourite daughter, and they frequently turn out more ungrateful than the very dogs we feed--and as Byron says, ‘Alas, our young affections run to waste and water but the desert!’ Byron was the only poet who ever lived, in my opinion!”

Major Desmond gave a short laugh.

“Upon my word, Fitz, you’re a regular old croaker this evening, aren’t you? You’re making our hostess quite miserable!”

“Oh no,” said Miss Letty, brightly, for with her usual sweetness she never thought of her own “wasted young affections” at all, but only of the disappointments of her friends, and she knew that Fitz had suffered. “I feel with Captain Crosby, that some things are very hard for us to understand. But I think myself that just as no drop of dew or grain of dust is wasted, so no kind action or true love is wasted either. It may seem so,--but it is not. And let us hope poor Boy will be all right. But he certainly ought to be sent to school. I think”--here she paused and looked up smiling--“I think I shall have another try.”

The Major paused in his game, while his friend Fitz glowered sullenly at the balls.

“You will, Letty? You mean you will try to give the little chap another chance of proper education?”

“Yes, I think so,” said Miss Letty, bending over her knitting, while her needles clicked cheerily in her small, pretty hands. “I will write very earnestly to both Captain and Mrs. D’Arcy-Muir, and make a perfectly plain, practical, business proposal to them. If they refuse it, well, I shall have relieved my feelings by asking.”

A sudden radiance seemed to illuminate the billiard-table, but it was only Fitz smiling across it.

“Just like you, Miss Letty,” he said. “Whenever there is something good to be done you are the one to do it!”

Miss Letty shook her head deprecatingly and went on with her knitting for a while,--then presently she retired to bed after sending in whiskies and sodas to the two gentlemen to refresh themselves while finishing their game. Fitz had turned crusty again, apparently. Jerking his head backward towards the door through which Miss Letty had disappeared after saying her gentle good-night, he demanded,

“Why didn’t you marry her?”

“Because she wouldn’t have me,” replied the Major promptly.

“Why wouldn’t she have you?”

“Because she is keeping faith with a dead rascal. Expects to meet him somewhere in heaven by-and-by! Lord, if ever a liar and scamp deserves to wear a crown of gold and sing ‘Hallelujah,’ then Harry Raikes is a real live angel and no mistake!”

“Upon my word!” said Fitz slowly, “I think it’s liars and scoundrels generally who consider that they’re the very people fitted for gold crowns in heaven. Now _I_ don’t expect a gold crown. I don’t consider myself worth an angel’s feather, let alone a pair of angel’s wings. But I have a pious uncle--old as Methuselah--who goes to church three times a day and slangs all his neighbours who don’t--and will you believe me, he has an idea that God is thoroughly well pleased with him for that. What a blasphemous old beggar it is!”

He laughed, and in his enjoyment allowed the Major to win the game at billiards. Then putting up his cue he mixed a mild glass of whisky and water and drank it off.

“I’ll go to bed now, Dick,” he said; “I don’t stay up as late as I used to!”

“We’re getting on, Fitz, that’s why,” replied Desmond. “We’re getting on, that’s what it is.”

“Yes, that’s what it is,” returned Fitz cheerily. “But I really don’t mind. Getting on means getting out--getting out of this world into a better. Good night, old chap!”

“Good night!”

And the two worthy fellows went to their respective rooms and slept the sleep of the just. But there were two other people in the house who could not sleep at all that night--these were Miss Letty and Boy. Miss Letty was grieving for Boy, and Boy was grieving for himself. What was she to do about Boy? Miss Leslie thought. What was he to do about himself? Boy thought. Miss Letty felt that if she could only get Boy away from his home surroundings, and place him at a good English preparatory school, she would perhaps be the saving of him. Boy felt that if he could only run away somewhere on one of those ambitious expeditions which Alister McDonald was always telling him about, he might, to put it grandly, make a career. But the world was broad and wide, and he was very small and young. Difficulties bristled in his path, and he had not the heart nor the strength to face them even in thought. The spark of an aspiring intelligence was within him, but the influences were all against its kindling up into a useful or brilliant flame.

The next day saw him again at play with Alister, and the two boys went out on Loch Katrine together in a boat to fish for trout. They were not very skilled fishermen, and there was a good deal more splashing about with the line, and patting the water with the oars than anything else. They stayed wobbling about on the friendly lake till sunset,--and then as they saw the majestic king of the sky descend into the west, glorious in panoply of gold and crimson, with fleecy white clouds rolling themselves into a great canopy for his head, and a wide stretch of crimson spreading beneath him like a carpet for his march downward, both the children were suddenly overcome by a sense of awe, and watched the brilliant colours of the heavens, and the purple shadows of the mountains reflected on the water, in silence for many minutes.

“I say, Boy, what are you going to be?” asked Alister, after a long pause.

Boy answered with truth, “I don’t know.”

“I’m going to be a soldier,” said Alister. “It’s a fine thing to be a soldier. Though father says a soldier can’t get a drink if he wants to, unless he takes off his uniform first. Isn’t that battish? But whenever we have another war we’re going to keep our uniforms on and drink in them whenever we want to.”

“And will you go and fight?” asked Boy wistfully.

“Rather! Let me hear any one abusing England, and I’ll run them straight through with my sword in no time!”

“Will you--really?” And Boy looked respectfully at Alister’s round face, already seeing the martial hero in the saucy physiognomy of his friend,--the sparkling eyes, the defiant little nose, and the chubby dimpled chin.

“When you’re a soldier, you’re a defender of the country,” went on Alister, “and the Queen says, ‘Thank you very much, I hope you’ll do your duty!’ And you get medals and things, and the Victoria Cross. That’s what’s called a V.C. I know a man who’s got that, and he’s just as proud as Punch. He’s one of father’s friends. But he’s awfully poor--awfully. And he’s got rheumatism through having slept out several nights on a field of battle--and he’s all cramped and funny, with twisted legs and crooked fingers, but he’s just as proud as Punch of his V.C.”

Boy tried to grasp the picture of a gentleman who was “all cramped and funny, with twisted legs and crooked fingers,” who was “just as proud as Punch.” But he could not do it. And Alister putting up his oars said, “Let’s have some music!” and forthwith drew out a concertina from the bottom of the boat and discoursed thereon a wailful ear-piercing melody. Boy had heard him play this distressing instrument before, but never quite so dolefully. The melancholy snoring sounds emanating from between Alister’s fat fingers seemed to cast a gloom over the landscape--to make the mountains around them look darker and more eerie--to give a melodramatic effect to the sinking sun, and to suggest the possibility of bogies and kelpies trooping down on the Silver Strand to perform a fantastic dance thereon. Alister thought his own playing quite beautiful; Boy considered it lovely too, but dreadful. When he could bear it no more he ventured to disturb the performance.

“I say, Alister!”

Alister’s eyes had closed in a dumb ecstacy over a particularly prolonged and dismal chord, but he opened them quickly and stopped playing.

“What?”

“How do you start being a soldier?”

“You go to school first--preparatory,” said Alister, putting away the concertina, much to Boy’s relief. “I’m there now. Then you go to a regular public military training school, and you learn heaps and heaps of things,--then you are measured and weighed, and your chest is thumped and your teeth looked to, then if that’s all right, you perhaps go to Sandhurst, and then you pass all sorts of stiff exams. In fact,” said Alister, warming with his subject, “you learn _everything_! There’s _nothing_ that you’re not expected to know. Think of that! And you must keep your teeth all right, and your chest sound, and you must grow to a certain height. Oh, there’s lots to do all round, I can tell you!”

“I see!”

Boy’s heart sank, but he determined to ask to be sent to school directly he went home again. He would not, if he could help it, remain under the tuition of Rattling Jack.

“Aren’t you going to school?” queried Alister.

“I hope so.”

“Come to mine,” said Alister. “It’s awfully jolly,--we play cricket and football and hockey, and we have supper-fights and no end of larks. Ask your father to send you to mine. I’ll give you the address when we get home.”

“Thanks,” said Boy, with an attempt to look as if the going to Alister’s school would be the easiest thing in the world,--“I will see if I can come.”

Poor little lad! He had no more hope of being sent to Alister’s school than of being carried off in a fairy boat to the moon. But he thought a great deal about school that night when he had parted from his chum.

“I’ll tell mother I want to go to school,” he said to himself. “That can do no harm. If she won’t send me I’ll have to run away.”

Meanwhile Miss Leslie wrote long and very earnest letters to both Captain and Mrs. D’Arcy-Muir. Once more she offered to make Boy her heir, on condition that she should be allowed to take care of him, and control his education. Her letters arrived at their destination when the “Honourable Jim” was snoring the hours away in a heavy drunken sleep, and naturally Mrs. D’Arcy-Muir read the one intended for her husband as well as the one addressed to herself. She smiled a fat smile as she consigned the one written to Jim (“Like her impudence!” she murmured to herself) to the convenient flames, and resolved to say nothing about it (“For the education of my son,” she said, “is my affair!”). She laid her large hand on her large breast with an approving and consolatory pat. To be a “mother” was a great thing.

“Silly old woman!” ejaculated Mrs. D’Arcy-Muir, her stout bust heaving with matronly offence. “She has lost all her own matrimonial chances--she would insist on sticking to the memory of Harry Raikes--and there she is, of course, all alone in the world, and wants my boy to be a son to her. Poor dear child! A nice time he would have of it, a slave to an old maid’s fads and fancies!”

So she sat down and wrote the following letter. She had a shocking handwriting,--it sloped downwards and sideways all over a sheet of paper, in very much the way her mind sloped and went sideways likewise:--

“MY DEAR LETITIA,

I am sorry to see from the tone of your letter that you are still feeling so lonely. Of course it is very hard for you to be all alone at your age, and I am very sorry for you. But to part with my son to you as you suggest is quite out of the question. A mother’s claims are paramount! I am sure you would be very nice to him, and the dear boy deserves everything that can possibly be done for his advantage, but his mother must preside over his education. I am sure that, though unmarried yourself, you will see the force of this. If, however, you still decide to make him your heir, I am sure he will be very worthy of it, and always remember you affectionately after you are gone. We shall expect our son home next week, and hope that Major Desmond will be able to escort him.

Yours very sincerely,

AMELIA D’ARCY-MUIR.”

This letter was the charter of Boy’s doom. Not all the stars in their courses would be able to alter his fate from henceforth. Miss Leslie cried quietly to herself in her room for nearly an hour,--then bathed her eyes, smoothed her hair, and attended to her household duties as placidly and sweetly as ever. She never spoke to Boy at all on the subject. To Major Desmond and his friend Fitz she said simply,--

“I wrote to Boy’s mother and father. But it is no use!”

“I thought not!” said the Major gruffly.

“Poor little chap!” said Fitz.

And by tacit consent they dropped the subject.

But one day before Boy went back to his loving parents, Miss Leslie took him out by himself for a walk with her through the beautiful Pass of Achray, and there sitting down by the dry and fragrant heather brilliant with bloom, she talked to him gently, holding his little grimy hand in her own.

“Boy,” she said, “if you ever want anything, will you write to me? You _can_ write now, can’t you?”

Boy nodded, looking a trifle pale and startled.

“Suppose,” went on Miss Leslie, feeling something like a wicked conspirator as she suggested it,--“Suppose you wanted to go to school and your father wouldn’t let you, do you think--do you think--you could run away to me?”

And the gentle lady’s soft cheeks crimsoned at the audacity of this proposal.

But Boy’s eyes glittered. This was like one of Alister’s adventures.

“Yes,” he replied breathlessly, “I’m sure I could!”

“Well, well--we will hope that won’t be necessary,” said Miss Leslie hastily. “You mustn’t of course _ever_ do such a thing unless you are quite driven to it. But if you _are_ in trouble of any sort write to me, and I will--I will meet you anywhere.” This with a hazy notion that if it were the North Pole she would somehow manage to be there.

Boy threw his arms round her neck and kissed her.

“Oh, you are good--good!,” he said: “I wish I were _your_ Boy!”

Miss Letty patted him with a trembling hand--but was silent.

The bees buzzed drowsily in the heather bells,--the blue sky was flecked with beautiful white clouds, and the lights and shadows changed the aspect of the mountains every few minutes. A little “burnie” chattered at their feet, gurgling over the stones and pebbles, and chuckling among the ferns and grasses, and over its silver ribbon-like streak two gorgeous dragon-flies chased each other, the sunlight flashing gold upon their iridescent wings.

“I wish I could stay with you altogether,” said Boy, taking off his cap and ruffling his pretty fair hair with his hands in a sort of nervous agitation--“I feel so happy with you! See how lovely it all is to-day!--God seems really good out here!”

“God _is_ really good always, darling,” said Miss Letty.

“Yes, I suppose He is--but where we are He doesn’t seem good a bit. The people are dirty and miserable and poor,--and even the sea looks cruel!”

“Poor Boy!” murmured Miss Letty to herself, quickly understanding the sense of loneliness and bitterness which sometimes overpowered the child’s mind. Aloud she said, as cheerily as she could,--

“That’s only fancy, Boy! Everything is good and beautiful in the world as God made it and intended it to be; it’s only the bad dispositions and wickednesses of men that make things seem difficult. But if you are good and straightforward everything will come right, and you will perhaps understand why you are sometimes a little bit sad and lonely now. I daresay it’s all for the best....” She paused, because in her own clear soul she could _not_ think it was quite for the best that the little fellow should have a drunken father and a sloven mother. “Promise me one thing, Boy,” she went on,--“Never tell a lie. Liars come to no good,--and when you go to school--for I expect you will go to school--you will find that all nice English boys are brought up to be frank and true, and to stand upon their honour. If a boy tells a lie to shield himself, he is looked upon as a coward by all his school-fellows. Remember that! No matter what scrapes you get into, tell the truth right out, without the least fear, and you may be sure you are doing well. Even if you get punished, a day’s punishment is much better than a lie on your conscience.”

Boy listened reverently.

“I’ll remember,” he said.

“That’s right!” And Miss Letty took him again in her arms and kissed him--“God bless you, dear! Try and grow up a good man! You will have a great many troubles and difficulties, I daresay--we all have; but go on trying--try always to be a good brave man!”

Boy returned her embrace with fervour, and promised. After this they went home, and the end of the week saw Boy back again in the remote fishing village with his mother only. His father had gone away on a yachting trip with a friend as fond of the bottle as himself, and some unkind people said what a good thing it would be if the yacht should go down quietly in the waves and make a speedy end of the two convivialists. Boy was personally rather glad of his father’s absence, as he thought it gave him a better chance to discuss things with his mother. For the first one or two days after his return he was very reticent,--he did not say much about his holiday in Scotland--but only mentioned his little friend Alister McDonald.

“Who _is_ he?” demanded Mrs. D’Arcy-Muir.

“Oh, he’s just Alister McDonald,” answered Boy.

“Don’t be stupid, Boy. I mean who is his father?”

“Does that matter?”

“Matter! Of course it matters. Family is everything. You must belong to a good family for you to be anybody.”

“Must you? Then how about Robert Burns?”

“Robert Burns?” Mrs. D’Arcy-Muir’s mouth opened in astonishment.

“Yes,” went on Boy dauntlessly,--“I heard all about him in Scotland. They’re always talking about him. Robert Burns was a ploughman--and he wrote such beautiful things that everybody, even now, though he is dead ever so long ago, wants to try and make out that they’re connected with him in some way or other. Is that what you mean by a good family?”

“No, I don’t--certainly not!”--snapped out his mother. “Robert Burns was a very disreputable person. People who write poetry usually are. I didn’t ask you who Robert Burns was. I asked you who your friend Alister’s father was.”

“Colonel McDonald,” answered Boy,--“of the Gordon Highlanders.”

Mrs. D’Arcy-Muir “looked up” his regiment at once, and found that Colonel McDonald was a very distinguished person indeed--quite good blood, in fact--really quite. Whereupon she graciously approved of Alister as Boy’s friend; and Boy, emboldened by this, said,--

“Couldn’t I go to school where Alister is, mother? I do want to go to school!”

Mrs. D’Arcy-Muir asked the name of the school, and when she heard it, pursed her lips together dubiously. It was a famous school, and an expensive one. It boasted of some of the finest teachers in England, whose services were not to be had for nothing.

“I’ll see about it,” she said grandiloquently,--“I’m not sure I should approve of that school. But of course you must go to school somewhere--and I’ll arrange it for you as soon as I can.”

Having put the idea into her head, Boy waited with tolerable equanimity. He would write, he thought, to Miss Letty when everything was settled. In the meantime his mother, in her own peculiar pig-headed way, set to work reading all the advertisements of cheap schools in all the papers, and hit upon one at last that particularly seemed to appeal to her,--one which provided knowledge with physical and moral training for life generally, at the humble cost of about twenty pounds--board and lodging were included--a year. That would do, she resolved. An exchange of letters between herself and the proprietor of this “first-class educational establishment” soon settled the matter--“for,” said Mrs. D’Arcy-Muir, “there is no occasion to consult Jim. He is too sodden with whisky to know what he is about--he will have to pay the money,--and I shall have to get it out of him, and--and that’s all.”

And one morning she informed Boy of his approaching destination.

“I have managed a school for you, Boy,” she said. “I’m getting your clothes ready, and next week you are going to France.”

“France!” cried Boy, and his little heart sank almost into his little boots.

“Yes, France!” said his mother. “There’s a charming school at a place called Noirville in Brittany, and I have arranged for you to go there. You’ll learn to speak French, which is always a great advantage to a boy. Why, what are you crying about?”

Poor Boy! He tried hard to keep back his tears, but it was no use--and the more he fought against them, the faster they fell.

“Oh, mother, mother!” he said, at last giving way to his sobs, “I did want to be a real English boy!--a real, _real_ English boy!”

Mrs. D’Arcy-Muir’s little eyes almost shot out of her head in the extremity of her staring astonishment.

“What a ridiculous child you are!” she burst out at last. “How can you be anything else than a real English boy? Isn’t your father English? Am not I--your mother--English? And were you not born in England? Good gracious me! I never heard such nonsense in my life! Silly cry-baby! Do you think going to school in France will alter your birth and your nature?”

Boy choked back his sobs, and controlled his tears,--but not trusting himself to speak, he went straight out of his mother’s presence, and ran as hard as his little legs could carry him down to the sea-shore. There he sat, a forlorn little figure, on the sand close to the fringe of the sea, and tried to think. It was a difficult task, for he was too young to analyse his own emotions. His hazy idea that he could not possibly be ‘a real English boy’ if he went to school in France was purely instinctive--he knew nothing about foreign countries or foreign customs of education. But he was hopelessly, bitterly disappointed,--deplorably, cruelly cast down. He knew it would be no use appealing to his mother. And he did not know where his father was. Even if he had known, he could have done nothing with that estimable parent. It seemed very useless to try and do one’s best, he thought. Since he had come back from Scotland he had been so thoroughly determined to follow Miss Letty’s precepts--to attempt by small degrees the work of becoming ‘a good brave man,’ that he had avoided all the dirty little scavenger-boys of the place he had used to foregather with, and he had not even been to see Rattling Jack. He had remained nearly all day with his mother, doing the lessons she gave him to do, and obeying her in every trifling particular, and had been most gently docile and affectionate in his conduct. The silly woman, however, had taken all his loving attention as a proof that he had found Miss Leslie so ‘faddy,’ and her house in Scotland so dull, that he was glad and grateful to be at home again with ‘his own dear mother,’ as she herself put it. And now---- she was going to send him away to France! His wistful eyes scanned the ocean and the far blue line of the distant horizon,--there was a storm coming up from the north, and the first gusts of wind ruffled the waves and gave them white crests, over which three or four seagulls flew with doleful screams, and Boy’s heart grew heavier and heavier. Presently he got up from the sand, dusting his little clothes free from the sparkling grains.

“It’s no use,” he said hopelessly,--“it isn’t a bit of use! I shall never be anything--neither a soldier nor a sailor, nor anybody. But I’ll write to Miss Letty.”

He had begun to retrace his steps homeward, when he saw a figure coming along the stretches of sand,--a figure that stooped and shuffled, and carried a basket on its back. Boy recognized it as the visible form and composition of Rattling Jack, and went straight up to it.

“Hullo, Jack!” said he with a little smile.

The old gentleman turned his bent head round on one side.

“Who be ye?” he demanded. “My back is that stiff with rheumatiz, and my neck is that wincy that I can’t lift myself up anyhow!”

“Oh, I’m so sorry!” said Boy, in his sweet little childish voice. “Couldn’t I carry your basket for you?”

Stiff in the back and “wincy” in the neck as he declared himself to be, Rattling Jack did manage to raise his stooping figure a little at this question, and to stare through fuzzy tangles of hair, eyebrow, and whisker at his small friend, whom he gradually recognized.

“Oh, it be ye, be it?” he grunted then, not unkindly. “Ye went to Scotland, didn’t ye, awhile sen?”

“Yes,” said Boy. “And--and--next week I’m going away again,--to school.”

“That’s right!” said Rattling Jack approvingly. “That’s the best thing for yer! There be nothin’ like a good English school for boys----”

“But it isn’t an English school!” said Boy. “I’m going to France----”

“Fra--ance!” roared the old seaman. “What d’ye know of France?”

“Nothing!” said Boy dispiritedly. “I shall be all alone out there,--and I don’t speak a word of French!”

Rattling Jack surveyed him for a few minutes in grim silence. The situation appeared to interest him, for he unslung his basket and set it down on the shore. Whatever the basket’s business, it was evident it could wait. Then partly straightening himself with an effort, he said slowly,--

“Who be sending ye to school in France?”

“My mother,” responded Boy.

“Poor little devil! May God help yer,” said Rattling Jack with hoarse solemnity; “for ye’ll come back never no more!”

“Oh yes; I shall come back for the holidays, I suppose,” said Boy practically.

“Stow that!” said Jack, with a sudden stentorian vigour which was quite alarming. “What’s ’olidays! Yes, ye’ll come back mebbe for ’olidays, but it won’t be you!”

“Won’t be me?” echoed Boy wonderingly. “It must be me!”

“It can’t be!” persisted Jack,--“France ain’t a turnin’-out establishment for Englishmen. Never a bit of it! Ye’ll go to France a poor decent little chap enough as yer seems to be, but ye’ll never come back _that_ way,--ye’ll come back a little mincin’, lyin’ rascal, parly-vooin’ like a hass, an’ hoppin’ like a frog! That’s what ye’ll be. Ye’ll be afraid of cold water, and skeered-like at the sight of yer own skin--and ye’ll never look any livin’ creetur in the face agin! And ye’ll be a dirty, mean, creepy-crawly little Frenchy--that’s what ye’ll be!”

“No, I won’t!” cried Boy, quite appalled at this vivid picture of himself _in futuro_. “Don’t say I will! I know you’ve travelled a lot, and that you’ve seen France----”

“Seen France!” And Rattling Jack snorted indignation at the air. “Rather! And seen Frenchmen too! And licked them into the bottom of their own shinin’ boots! Seen France! Yes!--it’s a great place for frogs--hoppin’ round, and all alive oh!

Mary, Mary, quite contrary, How does your garden grow?

Thank you marm, kindly, but frogs ’as eaten me out of ’ouse and ’ome an’ garden too! Hor--hor--hor!”

And Rattling Jack began to indulge in those deep, uncouth sounds which he produced as laughter. Always deeply impressed by his own wit, he liked to appreciate any joke he thought he had perpetrated to its full extent and flavour, and Boy waited patiently till his ‘hor--hor--hor’ decreased in volume and died away in a snuffle.

“Yes, I’m sure you’re quite right about France,” he then said timidly--“because you have been there. But you see, I can’t help it. I shall have to go there if my mother sends me!”

Rattling Jack laid a big hand on Boy’s small shoulder.

“Yes, I suppose you’ll hev to do as yer mother bids. I don’t know yer mother, and don’t want to. If I did, mebbe I’d give her a bit o’ my mind. What I thinks is this--that the ways of natur are best, and in the ways of natur mothers don’t interfere when they’ve done their nussin’. See!” And he stretched out an arm with a roughly eloquent gesture towards the ocean, where the seagulls screamed and flew--“They birds has to take the rough-and-tumble of the storm and the sea. Born and bred in a hole of the cliffs, they’ve got to larn to fly--and larn they do,--and when they flies, they flies their own way--they takes it and they keeps it! And so with all birds and animals ’cept man. Man’s the idiot of the universe, always a worritin’ of himself. He wants his chillun to be just like himself, and a mussiful Lord makes ’em as different as chalk from cheese. For which let’s be joyful! And when they wants to go their own way, man, the idiot, pulls ’em back, and says, ‘you shan’t!’ An’ then it’s more than likely old Nick steps in an’ says, ‘you shall!’ And away they go, straight to the devil! When I was a boy I took my own way--and wal!--here I am!”

“And do you like yourself now?” asked Boy respectfully.

“Like myself? Of course I like myself! I ain’t got no one else to like me, so why shouldn’t I like myself?”

“_I_ like you,” said Boy,--“I always have liked you! I think you so--so clever!”

Rattling Jack was not often shaken from the cynical attitude he chose to assume towards all mankind, but this innocent remark certainly touched him in a weak spot. He was not insensible to flattery,--and the evident fact that Boy did not intend to flatter, but spoke with the simple conviction of his own heart, moved the old seafarer to a sudden stirring of more fervent feeling than was customary with him.

“Ye’ve a good deal o’ sense for a little chap,” he observed condescendingly, “and I don’t mind sayin’ that I’ve rather took to ye. Now, look’y ’ere! If ye don’t want to go to school in France, why don’t you do as they seagulls do, and fly away?”

“Fly away!” repeated Boy,--“you mean, run away!”

“Fly or run, it’s all the same, bless yer ’eart!” said Jack. “Get out of yer little hole in the rock and spread yer wings to the sun and the breeze! Hain’t yer got any friends?”

“Yes, I’ve one very good friend,” said Boy, thinking of Miss Letty. “She’s a very kind lady, and I’m going to write to her. But you see if I ran away I should be brought back again--I’m not very old--I’m not quite ten yet.”

“Not quite ten, ain’t yer!” said Jack, suddenly becoming conscious of the extreme youth and helplessness of his small friend. “That ain’t much, for sartin! Wal!--look ’ere,--I’ll tell you what I’ll do for ye--I’ll give ye a tiger’s tooth!”

Boy stared.

“Will you?” he said. “What’s it for?”

“A tiger’s tooth,” said Jack solemnly, “takes the owner through the forests o’ difficulty. A tiger’s tooth protects him agin his enemies! Mark that! Take it with ye to France! A tiger’s tooth bites traitors! A tiger’s tooth! Lord love ye!--a’most anythin’ can be done with a tiger’s tooth! Look at it!”

He fumbled in his pocket, and pulled out a shining white object of pointed ivory.

“That come from Bengal,” he said. “An’ ’e as give it to me was what they call a ma-geesan! He could swallow sarpints and fire quite promiskus-like,--seemed his nat’ral food. An’ ’e sed to me, ses ’e, ‘’Ere’s a tiger’s tooth for ye,--keep it in mem’ry of the world-famous Oriental conjurer Garoo-Garee!’ And then ’e guv a screech an’ was gone!”

Boy listened to this interesting narrative with awe. “What a wonderful man!” he said. “And his name was Garoo-Garee!”

“Just that!” answered Jack. “Will ye have the tooth?”

“Indeed I will!” said Boy gratefully, taking the mystic talisman out of Jack’s horny palm--“you’re awfully good to me! I’m ever so much obliged! And if I have to go to France, I will come and see you directly I get back.”

Rattling Jack shouldered his basket again slowly, and with difficulty.

“No, ye won’t!” he said dismally. “No, ye won’t think no more o’ me among they Frenchies. God bless my ’eart! An’ not yet ten ye ain’t! Wal, good-bye to ye! I’ll not be seein’ ye agin in this mortal world,--so I’ll just think o’ ye kindly, as a little chap wot’s dead!”

Boy’s heart sank, and his young blood seemed to grow cold.

“Oh, don’t do that, Jack!” he cried; “don’t do that!”

“I must,” said Jack with dreary gravity, looking a melancholy figure enough as he stood on the wet sand, with the gray storm-clouds scudding overhead, and the wind tossing his scanty white locks of hair. “For when a child is a child he’s one thing--and when he ain’t, he’s another. First there’s a baby--then there ain’t no baby, but a child,--and the baby’s gone. Then by-and-by there ain’t no child, but a boy--and the child’s gone. Then, afore ye can so much as look round, the boy’s gone, and there’s a man. Argyfyin’ my way, ye see baby, child, boy is all gone, which is to say, dead--for what’s bein’ dead but gone, and what’s bein’ gone but dead? And only the man is left, which is generally a poor piece of work. There’s wise folk writin’ in the newspapers wot calls it ever-lotion, but wot it is the lotion’s good for, God only knows. Anyhow I’ve seen a darned sight many more decent chillun than I have men. Which it proves that the chillun is dead. But my talk is too deep for ye--I kin see that! Ye poor little skinny white-faced chap,--ye can’t be expected to understan’ Feel Osophy.”

“No,” said Boy humbly, “I’m afraid I don’t quite understand. But I hope you’ll think of me just as if I were here,--you see you have given me the tiger’s tooth--and I shall never forget you!”

“M’appen the tooth will do somethin’ in the way of nippin’ the memory,” said Jack thoughtfully,--“mebbe so! Good-bye t’yer! There’s a cloud just a-goin’ to burst in the sky, and ye’ll be drenched to the skin afore ye knows where ye are!” and he turned up his quaint old physiognomy to the darkening heavens, from which already big drops of rain were beginning to fall. “Run ’ome, little ’un! Run ’ome! That mother o’ yourn ’ll be down on ye if ye wets yer clothes. Shake ’ands?” For Boy had timidly extended his small hand. “Sartinly!” And the old man grasped the tiny child fingers within his own rough dirty ones. “For it’s a long good-bye! Sartin sure of that I am! Don’t let ’em make a frog of ye out there in France, if ye can ’elp it. Good-bye! I’ll just think o’ ye as if ye were dead!”

The rain now began to fall in heavy earnest, and Boy could not stop to protest further against this obstinate final statement of his seafaring friend. He put the tiger’s tooth in his pocket, smiled, lifted his cap, and ran, a little light figure flying across the sand, some of his curls escaping loose and gleaming like the sunshine that was now lacking in the sky. Rattling Jack stood still and watched him go, heedless of the rain that began to drift in sweeping gusts round and round him. The sea uprose and lashed the flat shore with fringes of yellow foam, angrily murmuring and snarling like some savage beast of prey. But Jack heard nothing, or if he heard, he did not heed. Equally he saw nothing, but that small child figure racing through the rain over the glistening sand, till at the corner of an old jetty where the mists of the land and sea hung low like a curtain, it turned and disappeared.

“There ye go!” said the old man, talking to himself--“there ye go--away for ever! An’ the rain fallin’, and the mists a-gatherin’. There ye go! The way of all the chillun--a bit of sunshine, and then the mist and the rain! There ye go--and good-bye to ye! Ye wor a nice little chap--quiet, yet speerety-like--a nice little chap ye wor, an’ I’ll think o’ ye kindly, as if the good God had took ye,--just as if ye wor dead!”