Hillsborough and its outlying suburbs make bricks by the million, spin and weave both wool and cotton, forge in steel from the finest needle up to a ship's armor, and so add considerably to the kingdom's wealth.

But industry so vast, working by steam on a limited space, has been fatal to beauty: Hillsborough, though built on one of the loveliest sites in England, is perhaps the most hideous town in creation. All ups and down and back slums. Not one of its wriggling, broken-backed streets has handsome shops in an unbroken row. Houses seem to have battled in the air, and stuck wherever they tumbled down dead out of the mêlée. But worst of all, the city is pockmarked with public-houses, and bristles with high round chimneys. These are not confined to a locality, but stuck all over the place like cloves in an orange. They defy the law, and belch forth massy volumes of black smoke, that hang like acres of crape over the place, and veil the sun and the blue sky even in the brightest day. But in a fog--why, the air of Hillsborough looks a thing to plow, if you want a dirty job.

More than one crystal stream runs sparkling down the valleys, and enters the town; but they soon get defiled, and creep through it heavily charged with dyes, clogged with putridity, and bubbling with poisonous gases, till at last they turn to mere ink, stink, and malaria, and people the churchyards as they crawl.

This infernal city, whose water is blacking, and whose air is coal, lies in a basin of delight and beauty: noble slopes, broad valleys, watered by rivers and brooks of singular beauty, and fringed by fair woods in places; and, eastward, the hills rise into mountains, and amongst them towers Cairnhope, striped with silver rills, and violet in the setting sun.

Cairnhope is a forked mountain, with a bosom of purple heather and a craggy head. Between its forks stood, at the period of my story, a great curiosity; which merits description on its own account, and also as the scene of curious incidents to come.

It was a deserted church. The walls were pierced with arrow-slits, through which the original worshipers had sent many a deadly shaft in defense of their women and cattle, collected within the sacred edifice at the first news of marauders coming.

Built up among the heathery hills in times of war and trouble, it had outlived its uses. Its people had long ago gone down into the fruitful valley, and raised another church in their midst, and left this old house of God alone, and silent as the tombs of their forefathers that lay around it.

It was no ruin, though on the road to decay. One of the side walls was much lower than the other, and the roof had two great waves, and was heavily clothed, in natural patterns, with velvet moss, and sprinkled all over with bright amber lichen: a few tiles had slipped off in two places, and showed the rafters brown with time and weather: but the structure was solid and sound; the fallen tiles lay undisturbed beneath the eaves; not a brick, not a beam, not a gravestone had been stolen, not even to build the new church: of the diamond panes full half remained; the stone font was still in its place, with its Gothic cover, richly carved; and four brasses reposed in the chancel, one of them loose in its bed.

What had caused the church to be deserted had kept it from being desecrated; it was clean out of the way. No gypsy, nor vagrant, ever slept there, and even the boys of the village kept their distance. Nothing would have pleased them better than to break the sacred windows time had spared, and defile the graves of their forefathers with pitch-farthing and other arts; but it was three miles off, and there was a lion in the way: they must pass in sight of Squire Raby's house; and, whenever they had tried it, he and his groom had followed them on swift horses that could jump as well as gallop, had caught them in the churchyard, and lashed them heartily; and the same night notice to quit had been given to their parents, who were all Mr. Raby's weekly tenants: and this had led to a compromise and flagellation 2.

Once or twice every summer a more insidious foe approached. Some little party of tourists, including a lady, who sketched in water and never finished anything, would hear of the old church, and wander up to it. But Mr. Raby's trusty groom was sure to be after them, with orders to keep by them, under guise of friendship, and tell them outrageous figments, and see that they demolished not, stole not, sculptured not.

All this was odd enough in itself, but it astonished nobody who knew Mr. Raby. His father and predecessor had guarded the old church religiously in his day, and was buried in it, by his own orders; and, as for Guy Raby himself, what wonder he respected it, since his own mind, like that old church, was out of date, and a relic of the past?

An antique Tory squire, nursed in expiring Jacobitism, and cradled in the pride of race; educated at Oxford, well read in books, versed in county business, and acquainted with trade and commerce; yet puffed up with aristocratic notions, and hugging the very prejudices our nobility are getting rid of as fast as the vulgar will let them.

He had a sovereign contempt for tradespeople, and especially for manufacturers. Any one of those numerous disputes between masters and mechanics, which distinguish British industry, might have been safely referred to him, for he abhorred and despised them both with strict impartiality.

The lingering beams of a bright December day still gilded the moss-clad roof of that deserted church, and flamed on its broken panes, when a young man came galloping toward it, from Hillsborough, on one of those powerful horses common in that district.

He came so swiftly and so direct, that, ere the sun had been down twenty minutes, he and his smoking horse had reached a winding gorge about three furlongs from the church. Here, however, the bridle-road, which had hitherto served his turn across the moor, turned off sharply toward the village of Cairnhope, and the horse had to pick his way over heather, and bog, and great loose stones. He lowered his nose, and hesitated more than once. But the rein was loose upon his neck, and he was left to take his time. He had also his own tracks to guide him in places, for this was by no means his first visit; and he managed so well, that at last he got safe to a mountain stream which gurgled past the north side of the churchyard: he went cautiously through the water, and then his rider gathered up the reins, stuck in the spurs, and put him at a part of the wall where the moonlight showed a considerable breach. The good horse rose to it, and cleared it, with a foot to spare; and the invader landed in the sacred precincts unobserved, for the road he had come by was not visible from Raby House, nor indeed was the church itself.

He was of swarthy complexion, dressed in a plain suit of tweed, well made, and neither new nor old. His hat was of the newest fashion, and glossy. He had no gloves on.

He dismounted, and led his horse to the porch. He took from his pocket a large glittering key and unlocked the church-door; then gave his horse a smack on the quarter. That sagacious animal walked into the church directly, and his iron hoofs rang strangely as he paced over the brick floor of the aisle, and made his way under the echoing vault, up to the very altar; for near it was the vestry-chest, and in that chest his corn.

The young man also entered the church; but soon came out again with a leathern bucket in his hand. He then went round the church, and was busily employed for a considerable time.

He returned to the porch, carried his bucket in, and locked the door, leaving the key inside.

That night Abel Eaves, a shepherd, was led by his dog, in search of a strayed sheep, to a place rarely trodden by the foot of man or beast, viz., the west side of Cairnhope Peak. He came home pale and disturbed, and sat by the fireside in dead silence. "What ails thee, my man?" said Janet, his wife; "and there's the very dog keeps a whimpering."

"What ails us, wife? Pincher and me? We have seen summat."

"What was it?" inquired the woman, suddenly lowering her voice.

"Cairnhope old church all o' fire inside."

"Bless us and save us!" said Janet, in a whisper.

"And the fire it did come and go as if hell was a blowing at it. One while the windows was a dull red like, and the next they did flare so, I thought it would all burst out in a blaze. And so 'twould, but, bless your heart, their heads ha'n't ached this hundred year and more, as lighted that there devilish fire."

He paused a moment, then said, with sudden gravity and resignation and even a sort of half business-like air, "Wife, ye may make my shroud, and sew it and all; but I wouldn't buy the stuff of Bess Crummles; she is an ill-tongued woman, and came near making mischief between you and me last Lammermas as ever was."

"Shroud!" cried Mrs. Eaves, getting seriously alarmed. "Why, Abel, what is Cairnhope old church to you? You were born in an other parish."

Abel slapped his thigh. "Ay, lass, and another county, if ye go to that." And his countenance brightened suddenly.

"And as for me," continued Janet, "I'm Cairnhope; but my mother came from Morpeth, a widdy: and she lies within a hundred yards of where I sit a talking to thee. There's none of my kin laid in old Cairnhope churchyard. Warning's not for thee, nor me, nor yet for our Jock. Eh, lad, it will be for Squire Raby. His father lies up there, and so do all his folk. Put on thy hat this minute, and I'll hood myself, and we'll go up to Raby Hall, and tell Squire."

Abel objected to that, and intimated that his own fireside was particularly inviting to a man who had seen diabolical fires that came and went, and shone through the very stones and mortar of a dead church.

"Nay, but," said Janet, "they sort o' warnings are not to be slighted neither. We must put it off on to Squire, or I shall sleep none this night."

They went up, hand in hand, and often looked askant upon the road.

When they got to the Hall, they asked to see Mr. Raby. After some demur they were admitted to his presence, and found him alone, so far as they could judge by the naked eye; but, as they arrived there charged to the muzzle with superstition, the room presented to their minds some appearances at variance with this seeming solitude. Several plates were set as if for guests, and the table groaned, and the huge sideboard blazed, with old silver. The Squire himself was in full costume, and on his bosom gleamed two orders bestowed upon his ancestors by James III. and Charles III. In other respects he was rather innocuous, being confined to his chair by an attack of gout, and in the act of sipping the superannuated compound that had given it him--port. Nevertheless, his light hair, dark eyebrows, and black eyes, awed them, and co-operated with his brilliant costume and the other signs of company, to make them wish themselves at the top of Cairnhope Peak. However, they were in for it, and told their tale, but in tremulous tones and a low deprecating voice, so that if the room should happen to be infested with invisible grandees from the other world, their attention might not be roused unnecessarily.

Mr. Raby listened with admirable gravity; then fixed his eyes on the pair, in silence; and then said in a tone so solemn it was almost sepulchral, "This very day, nearly a century and a half ago, Sir Richard Raby was beheaded for being true to his rightful king--"

"Eh, dear poor gentleman! so now a walks." It was Janet who edged in this--

"And," continued the gentleman, loftily ignoring the comment, "they say that on this night such of the Rabys as died Catholics hold high mass in the church, and the ladies walk three times round the churchyard; twice with their veils down, once with bare faces, and great eyes that glitter like stars."

"I wouldn't like to see the jades," quavered Abel: "their ladyships I mean, axing their pardon."

"Nor I!" said Janet, with a great shudder.

"It would not be good for you," suggested the Squire; "for the first glance from those dead and glittering eyes strikes any person of the lower orders dumb, the second, blind; the third, dead. So I'm informed. Therefore--let me advise you never to go near Cairnhope old church at night."

"Not I, sir," said the simple woman.

"Nor your children: unless you are very tired of them."

"Heaven forbid, sir! But oh, sir, we thought it might be a warning like."

"To whom?"

"Why, sir, th' old Squire lies there; and heaps more of your folk: and so Abel here was afear'd--but you are the best judge; we be no scholars. Th' old church warn't red-hot from eend to eend for naught: that's certain."

"Oh it is me you came to warn?" said Raby, and his lip curled.

"Well, sir," (mellifluously), "we thought you had the best right to know."

"My good woman," said the warned, "I shall die when my time comes. But I shall not hurry myself, for all the gentlemen in Paradise, nor all the blackguards upon earth."

He spake, and sipped his port with one hand, and waved them superbly back to their village with the other.

But, when they were gone, he pondered.

And the more he pondered, the further he got from the prosaic but singular fact.

In the old oak dining-room, where the above colloquy took place, hung a series of family portraits. One was of a lovely girl with oval face, olive complexion, and large dark tender eyes: and this was the gem of the whole collection; but it conferred little pleasure on the spectator, owing to a trivial circumstance--it was turned with its face to the wall; and all that met the inquiring eye was an inscription on the canvas, not intended to be laudatory.

This beauty, with her back to creation, was Edith Raby, Guy's sister.

During their father's lifetime she was petted and allowed her own way. Hillsborough, odious to her brother, was, naturally, very attractive to her, and she often rode into the town to shop and chat with her friends, and often stayed a day or two in it, especially with a Mrs. Manton, wife of a wealthy manufacturer.

Guy merely sneered at her, her friends, and her tastes, till he suddenly discovered that she had formed an attachment to one of the obnoxious class, Mr. James Little, a great contract builder. He was too shocked at first to vent his anger. He turned pale, and could hardly speak; and the poor girl's bosom began to quake.

But Guy's opposition went no further than cold aversion to the intimacy--until his father died. Then, though but a year older than Edith, he assumed authority and, as head of the house, forbade the connection. At the same time he told her he should not object, under the circumstances, to her marrying Dr. Amboyne, a rising physician, and a man of good family, who loved her sincerely, and had shown his love plainly before ever Mr. Little was heard of.

Edith tried to soften her brother; but he was resolute, and said Raby Hall should never be an appendage to a workshop. Sooner than that, he would settle it on his cousin Richard, a gentleman he abhorred, and never called, either to his face or behind his back, by any other name than "Dissolute Dick."

Then Edith became very unhappy, and temporized more or less, till her lover, who had shown considerable forbearance, lost patience at last, and said she must either have no spirit, or no true affection for him.

Then came a month or two of misery, the tender clinging nature of the girl being averse to detach itself from either of these two persons. She loved them both with an affection she could have so easily reconciled, if they would only have allowed her.

And it all ended according to Nature. She came of age, plucked up a spirit, and married Mr. James Little.

Her brother declined to be present at the wedding; but, as soon as she returned from her tour, and settled in Hillsborough, he sent his groom with a cold, civil note, reminding her that their father had settled nineteen hundred pounds on her, for her separate use, with remainder to her children, if any; that he and Mr. Graham were the trustees of this small fund; that they had invested it, according to the provisions of the settlement, in a first mortgage on land; and informing her that half a year's interest at 4 1/2 per cent was due, which it was his duty to pay into her own hand and no other person's; she would therefore oblige him by receiving the inclosed check, and signing the inclosed receipt.

The receipt came back signed, and with it a few gentle lines, "hoping that, in time, he would forgive her, and bestow on her what she needed and valued more than money; her own brother's, her only brother's affection."

On receiving this, his eyes were suddenly moist, and he actually groaned. "A lady, every inch!" he said; "yet she has gone and married a bricklayer."

Well, blood is thicker than water, and in a few years they were pretty good friends again, though they saw but little of one another, meeting only in Hillsborough, which Guy hated, and never drove into now without what he called his antidotes: a Bible and a bottle of lavender-water. It was his humor to read the one, and sprinkle the other, as soon as ever he got within the circle of the smoky trades.

When Edith's little boy was nine years old, and much admired for his quickness and love of learning, and of making walking-stick heads and ladies' work-boxes, Mr. Little's prosperity received a severe check, and through his own fault. He speculated largely in building villas, overdid the market, and got crippled. He had contracts uncompleted, and was liable to penalties; and at last saw himself the nominal possessor of a brick wilderness, but on the verge of ruin for want of cash.

He tried every other resource first; but at last he came to his wife, to borrow her £1900. The security he offered was a mortgage on twelve carcasses, or houses the bare walls and roofs of which were built.

Mrs. Little wrote at once to Mr. Raby for her money.

Instead of lending the trust-money hastily, Raby submitted the proposal to his solicitor, and that gentleman soon discovered the vaunted security was a second mortgage, with interest overdue on the first; and so he told Guy, who then merely remarked, "I expected as much. When had a tradesman any sense of honor in money matters? This one would cheat his very wife and child."

He declined the proposal, in two words, "Rotten security!"

Then Mr. James Little found another security that looked very plausible, and primed his wife with arguments, and she implored Guy to call and talk it over with them both.

He came that very afternoon, and brought his father's will.

Then Edith offered the security, and tried to convey to the trustee her full belief that it was undeniable.

Guy picked terrible holes in it, and read their father's will, confining the funds to consols, or a first mortgage on land. "You take the money on these conditions: it is almost as improper of you to wish to evade them, as it would be of me to assist you. And then there is your child; I am bound in honor not to risk his little fortune. See, here's my signature to that."

"My child!" cried Edith. "When he comes of age, I'll go on my knees to him and say, 'My darling, I borrowed your money to save your father's credit.' And my darling will throw his arms round me, and forgive me."

"Simpleton!" said Guy. "And how about your daughters and their husbands? And their husbands' solicitors? Will they throw their arms round your neck, and break forth into twaddle? No! I have made inquiries. Your husband's affairs are desperate. I won't throw your money into his well; and you will both live to thank me for seeing clearer than you do, and saving this £1900 for you and yours."

James Little had writhed in his chair for some time: he now cried out wildly,

"Edith, you shall demean yourself no more. He always hated me: and now let him have his will, and seal my dishonor and my ruin. Oblige me by leaving my house, Mr. Raby."

"Oh, no, James!" cried Edith, trembling, and shocked at this affront. But Guy rose like a tower. "I've noticed this trait in all tradespeople," said he grimly. "They are obsequious to a gentleman so long as they hope to get the better of him; but, the moment they find it is impossible to overreach him, they insult him." And with this he stalked out of the house.

"Oh, my poor James, how could you?" said Edith.

"Forgive me," said he, quietly. "It is all over. That was our last chance."

Guy Raby walked down the street, stung to the quick. He went straight to his solicitor and arranged to borrow £1900 on his own property. "For," said he, "I'll show them both how little a snob can understand a gentleman. I won't tamper with her son's money, but I'll give her my own to throw into his well. Confound him! why did she ever marry him?"

When the business was virtually settled, he came back to the house in great haste.

Meantime Mr. James Little went up to his dressing-room, as usual, to dress for dinner; but he remained there so long that, at last, Mrs. Little sent her maid to tell him dinner was ready.

The girl had hardly reached the top of the stairs, when she gave a terrible scream that rang through the whole house.

Mrs. Little rushed upstairs, and found her clinging to the balusters, and pointing at the floor, with eyes protruding and full of horror. Her candle-stick had fallen from her benumbed hand; but the hall-lamp revealed what her finger was quivering and pointing at: a dark fluid trickling slowly out into the lobby from beneath the bedroom door.

It was blood.

The room was burst into, and the wretched, tottering wife, hanging upon her sobbing servants, found her lover, her husband, her child's father, lying on the floor, dead by his own hand; stone dead. A terrible sight for strangers to see; but for her, what words can even shadow the horror of it!

I drop the veil on her wild bursts of agony, and piteous appeals to him who could not hear her cries.

The gaping wound that let out that precious life, her eye never ceased to see it, nor her own heart to bleed with it, while she lived.

She was gently dragged away, and supported down to another room. Doctor Amboyne came and did what he could for her; and that was--nothing.

At this time she seemed stupefied. But when Guy came beaming into the room to tell her he had got her the money, a terrible scene occurred. The bereaved wife uttered a miserable scream at sight of him, and swooned away directly.

The maids gathered round her, laid her down, and cut her stays, and told Guy the terrible tidings, in broken whispers, over her insensible body.

He rose to his feet horrified. He began to gasp and sob. And he yearned to say something to comfort her. At that moment his house, his heart, and all he had, were hers.

But, as soon as she came to herself, and caught sight of him, she screamed out, "Oh, the sight of him! the sight of him!" and swooned away again.

Then the women pushed him out of the room, and he went away with uneven steps, and sick at heart.

He shut himself up in Raby Hall, and felt very sad and remorseful. He directed his solicitor to render Mrs. Little every assistance, and supply her with funds. But these good offices were respectfully declined by Mr. Joseph Little, the brother of the deceased, who had come from Birmingham to conduct the funeral and settle other matters.

Mr. Joseph Little was known to be a small master-cutler, who had risen from a workman, and even now put blades and handles together with his own hands, at odd times, though he had long ceased to forge or grind.

Mr. Raby drew in haughtily at this interference.

It soon transpired that Mr. James Little had died hopelessly insolvent, and the £1900 would really have been ingulfed.

Raby waited for this fact to sink into his sister's mind; and then one day nature tugged so at his heart-strings, that he dashed off a warm letter beginning--"My poor Edith, let bygones be bygones," and inviting her and her boy to live with him at Raby Hall.

The heart-broken widow sent back a reply, in a handwriting scarcely recognizable as hers. Instead of her usual precise and delicate hand, the letters were large, tremulous, and straggling, and the lines slanted downward.

"Write to me, speak to me, no more. For pity's sake let me forget there is a man in the world who is my brother and his murderer.

"EDITH."

Guy opened this letter with a hopeful face, and turned pale as ashes at the contents.

But his conscience was clear, and his spirit high. "Unjust idiot!" he muttered, and locked her letter up in his desk.

Next morning he received a letter from Joseph Little, in a clear, stiff, perpendicular writing:--

"SIR,--I find my sister-in-law wrote you, yesterday, a harsh letter, which I do not approve; and have told her as much. Deceased's affairs were irretrievable, and I blame no other man for his rash act, which may God forgive! As to your kind and generous invitation, it deserves her gratitude; but Mrs. Little and myself have mingled our tears together over my poor brother's grave, and now we do not care to part. Before your esteemed favor came to hand, it had been settled she should leave this sad neighborhood and keep my house at Birmingham, where she will meet with due respect. I am only a small tradesman; but I can pay my debts, and keep the pot boiling. Will teach the boy some good trade, and make him a useful member of society, if I am spared.

"I am, sir, yours respectfully,

"JOSEPH LITTLE."

"Sir,--I beg to acknowledge, with thanks, your respectable letter.

"As all direct communication between Mrs. James Little and myself is at an end, oblige me with your address in Birmingham, that I may remit to you, half-yearly, as her agent, the small sum that has escaped bricks and mortar.

"When her son comes of age, she will probably forgive me for declining to defraud him of his patrimony.

"But it will be too late; for I shall never forgive her, alive or dead.

"I am, sir, your obedient servant,

"GUY RABY."

When he had posted this letter he turned Edith's picture to the wall, and wrote on the canvas--

He sent for his attorney, made a new will, and bequeathed his land, houses, goods, and chattels, to Dissolute Dick and his heirs forever.

The sorrowful widow was so fond of her little Henry, and the uncertainty of life was so burnt into her now, that she could hardly bear him out of her sight. Yet her love was of the true maternal stamp; not childish and self-indulgent. She kept him from school, for fear he should be brought home dead to her; but she gave her own mind with zeal to educate him. Nor was she unqualified. If she had less learning than school-masters, she knew better how to communicate what she did know to a budding mind. She taught him to read fluently, and to write beautifully; and she coaxed him, as only a woman can, over the dry elements of music and arithmetic. She also taught him dancing and deportment, and to sew on a button. He was a quick boy at nearly everything, but, when he was fourteen, his true genius went ahead of his mere talents; he showed a heaven-born gift for--carving in wood. This pleased Joseph Little hugely, and he fostered it judiciously.

The boy worked, and thought, and in time arrived at such delicacies of execution, he became discontented with the humdrum tools then current. "Then learn to make your own, boy," cried Joseph Little, joyfully; and so initiated him into the whole mystery of hardening, forging, grinding, handle-making, and cutlery: and Henry, young and enthusiastic, took his turn at them all in right down earnest.

At twenty, he had sold many a piece of delicate carving, and could make graving-tools incomparably superior to any he could buy; and, for his age, was an accomplished mechanic.

Joseph Little went the way of all flesh.

They mourned and missed him; and, at Henry's earnest request, his mother disposed of the plant, and went with him to London.

Then the battle of life began. He was a long time out of employment, and they both lived on his mother's little fortune.

But Henry was never idle. He set up a little forge hard by, and worked at it by day, and at night he would often sit carving, while his mother read to him, and said he, "Mother, I'll never rest till I can carve the bloom upon a plum."

Not to dwell on the process, the final result was this. He rose at last to eminence as a carver: but as an inventor and forger of carving tools he had no rival in England.

Having with great labor, patience, and skill, completed a masterpiece of carving (there were plums with the bloom on, and other incredibles), and also a set of carving-tools equally exquisite in their way, he got a popular tradesman to exhibit both the work and the tools in his window, on a huge silver salver.

The thing made a good deal of noise in the trade, and drew many spectators to the shop window.

One day Mr. Cheetham, a master-cutler, stood in admiration before the tools, and saw his way to coin the workman.

This Cheetham was an able man, and said to himself, "I'll nail him for Hillsborough, directly. London mustn't have a hand that can beat us at anything in our line."

He found Henry out, and offered him constant employment, as a forger and cutler of carving-tools, at £4 per week.

Henry's black eyes sparkled, but he restrained himself. "That's to be thought of. I must speak to my old lady. She is not at home just now."

He did speak to her, and she put her two hands together and said, "Hillsborough! Oh Henry!" and the tears stood in her eyes directly.

"Well, don't fret," said he: "it is only saying no."

So when Mr. Cheetham called again for the reply, Henry declined, with thanks. On this, Mr. Cheetham never moved, but smiled, and offered him £6 per week, and his journey free.

Henry went into another room, and argued the matter. "Come, mother, he is up to £6 a week now; and that is every shilling I'm worth; and, when I get an apprentice, it will be £9 clear to us."

"The sight of the place!" objected Mrs. Little, hiding her face in her hands instinctively.

He kissed her, and talked good manly sense to her, and begged her to have more courage.

She was little able to deny him, and she consented; but cried, out of his sight, a good many times about it.

As for Henry, strong in the consciousness of power and skill, he felt glad he was going to Hillsborough. "Many a workman has risen to the top of the tree in that place," said he. "Why, this very Cheetham was grinding saws in a water-wheel ten years ago, I've heard uncle Joe say. Come, mother, don't you be a baby! I'll settle you in a cottage outside the smoke; you shall make a palace of it; and we'll rise in the very town where we fell, and friends and foes shall see us."

Mr. Cheetham purchased both the carving and the tools to exhibit in Hillsborough; and the purchase-money, less a heavy commission, was paid to Henry. He showed Mrs. Little thirty pounds, and helped her pack up; and next day they reached Hillsborough by train.

Henry took a close cab, and carried his mother off to the suburbs in search of a lodging. She wore a thick veil, and laid her head on her son's shoulder, and held his brown though elegant hand with her white fingers, that quivered a little as she passed through the well-known streets.

As for Henry, he felt quite triumphant and grand, and consoled her in an off-hand, hearty way. "Come, cheer up, and face the music. They have all forgotten you by this time, and, when they do see you again, you shall be as good as the best of them. I don't drink, and I've got a trade all to myself here, and I'd rather make my fortune in this town than any other; and, mother, you have been a good friend to me; I won't ever marry till I have done you justice, and made you the queen of this very town."

And so he rattled on, in such high spirits, that the great soft thing began to smile with motherly love and pride through her tears, ere they found a lodging.

Next day to the works, and there the foreman showed him a small forge on the ground floor, and a vacant room above to make his handles in and put the tools together; the blades were to be ground, whetted, and finished by cheaper hands.

A quick-eared grinder soon came up to them, and said roughly, "Ain't we to wet new forge?"

"They want their drink out of you," said the foreman; and whispered, in great anxiety, "Don't say no, or you might as well work in a wasp's nest as here."

"All right," said Henry, cheerfully. "I'm no drinker myself, but I'll stand what is customary."

"That is right," said Foreman Bayne. "'Twill cost you fifteen shillings. But Peace is cheap at as many guineas."

The word was given, and every man who worked on the same floor with Henry turned out to drink at his expense, and left off work for a good hour. With some exceptions they were a rough lot, and showed little friendliness or good-humor over it. One even threw out a hint that no cockney forges were wanted in Hillsborough. But another took him up, and said, "Maybe not; but you are not much of a man to drink his liquor and grudge him his bread."

After this waste of time and money, Henry went back to the works, and a workman told him rather sulkily, he was wanted in the foreman's office.

He went in, and there was a lovely girl of eighteen, who looked at him with undisguised curiosity, and addressed him thus: "Sir, is it you that carve wood so beautifully?"

Henry blushed, and hesitated; and that made the young lady blush herself a very little, and she said, "I wished to take lessons in carving." Then, as he did not reply, she turned to Mr. Bayne. "But perhaps he objects to teach other people?"

"We should object to his teaching other workmen," said the foreman; "but," turning to Henry, "there is no harm in your giving her a lesson or two, after hours. You will want a set of the tools, miss?"

"Of course I shall. Please put them into the carriage; and--when will he come and teach me, I wonder? for I am wild to begin."

Henry said he could come Saturday afternoon, or Monday morning early.

"Whichever you please," said the lady, and put down her card on the desk; then tripped away to her carriage, leaving Henry charmed with her beauty and ease.

He went home to his mother, and told her he was to give lessons to the handsomest young lady he had ever seen. "She has bought the specimen tools too; so I must forge some more, and lose no time about it."

"Who is she, I wonder?"

"Here is her card. 'Miss Carden, Woodbine Villa, Heath Hill.'"

"Carden!" said the widow. Then, after a moment's thought, "Oh, Henry, don't go near them. Ah, I knew how it would be. Hillsborough is not like London. You can't be long hid in it."

"Why, what is the matter? Do you know the lady?"

"Oh, yes. Her papa is director of an insurance company in London. I remember her being born very well. The very day she was christened--her name is Grace--you were six years old, and I took you to her christening; and oh, Harry, my brother is her godfather. Don't you go near that Grace Carden; don't visit any one that knew us in better days."

"Why, what have we to be ashamed of?" said Henry. "'Tisn't as if we sat twiddling our thumbs and howling, 'We have seen better days.' And 'tisn't as if we asked favors of anybody. For my part I don't care who knows I am here, and can make three hundred a year with my own hands and wrong no man. I'd rather be a good workman in wood and steel than an arrogant old fool like your b--. No, I won't own him for yours or mine either--call him Raby. Well, I wouldn't change places with him, nor any of his sort: I'm a British workman, and worth a dozen Rabys--useless scum!"

"That you are, dear; so don't demean yourself to give any of them lessons. Her godfather would be sure to hear of it."

"Well, I won't, to please you. But you have no more pluck than a chicken--begging your pardon, mother."

"No, dear," said Mrs. Little, humbly, quite content to gain her point and lose her reputation for pluck; if any.

Henry worked regularly, and fast, and well, and in less than a fortnight a new set of his carving-tools were on view in Hillsborough, and another in London; for it was part of Mr. Cheetham's strategy to get all the London orders, and even make London believe that these superior instruments had originated in Hillsborough.

One day Miss Carden called and saw Bayne in the office. Her vivid features wore an expression of vexation, and she complained to him that the wood-carver had never been near her.

Bayne was surprised at that; but he was a man who always allayed irritation on the spot. "Rely on it, there's some reason," said he. "Perhaps he has not got settled. I'll go for him directly."

"Thank you," said the young lady. Then in the same breath, "No, take me to him, and perhaps we may catch him carving--cross thing!"

Bayne assented cheerfully, and led the way across a yard, and up a dirty stone stair, which, solid as it was, vibrated with the powerful machinery that steam was driving on every side of it. He opened a door suddenly, and Henry looked up from his work, and saw the invaders.

He stared a little at first, and then got up and looked embarrassed and confused.

"You did not keep your word, sir," said Grace, quietly.

"No," he muttered, and hung his head.

He seemed so confused and ashamed, that Bayne came to his assistance. "The fact is, no workman likes to do a hand's-turn on Saturday afternoon. I think they would rather break Sunday than Saturday."

"It is not that," said Henry, in a low voice.

Grace heard him, but answered Mr. Bayne: "Oh dear, I wish I had known. I fear I have made an unreasonable request: for, of course, after working so hard all the week--but then why did you let me purchase the tools to carve with? Papa says they are very dear, Mr. Bayne. But that is what gentlemen always say if one buys anything that is really good. But of course they will be dear, if I am not to be taught how to use them." She then looked in Mr. Bayne's face with an air of infantine simplicity: "Would Mr. Cheetham take them back, I wonder, under the circumstances?"

At this sly thrust, Bayne began to look anxious; but Henry relieved him the next moment by saying, in a sort of dogged way, "There, there; I'll come." He added, after a pause, "I will give you six lessons, if you like."

"I shall be so much obliged. When will you come, sir?"

"Next Saturday, at three o'clock."

"I shall be sure to be at home, sir."

She then said something polite about not disturbing him further, and vanished with an arch smile of pleasure and victory, that disclosed a row of exquisite white teeth, and haunted Henry Little for many a day after.

He told his mother what had happened, and showed so much mortified pride that she no longer dissuaded him from keeping his word. "Only pray don't tell her your name," said she.

"Well, but what am I to do if she asks it?"

"Say Thompson, or Johnson, or anything you like, except Little."

This request roused Henry's bile. "What, am I a criminal to deny my name? And how shall I look, if I go and give her a false name, and then she comes to Bayne and learns my right one? No, I'll keep my name back, if I can; but I'll never disown it. I'm not ashamed of it, if you are."

This reduced poor Mrs. Little to silence; followed, in due course, by a few meek, clandestine tears.

Henry put on his new tweed suit and hat, and went up to the villa. He announced himself as the workman from Cheetham's; and the footman, who had probably his orders, ushered him into the drawing-room at once. There he found Grace Carden seated, reading, and a young woman sewing at a respectful distance. This pair were types; Grace, of a young English gentlewoman, and Jael Dence of a villager by unbroken descent. Grace was tall, supple, and serpentine, yet not thin; Jael was robust and ample, without being fat; she was of the same height, though Grace looked the taller. Grace had dark brown eyes and light brown hair; and her blooming cheek and bewitching mouth shone with expression so varied, yet vivid, and always appropriate to the occasion, grave or gay, playful or dignified, that her countenance made artificial faces, and giggling in-the-wrong-place faces, painfully ridiculous. As for such faces as Jael's, it killed them on the spot, but that was all. Jael's hair was reddish, and her full eyes were gray; she was freckled a little under the eyes, but the rest of her cheek full of rich pure color, healthy, but not the least coarse: and her neck an alabaster column. Hers was a meek, monotonous countenance; but with a certain look of concentration. Altogether, a humble beauty of the old rural type; healthy, cleanly, simple, candid, yet demure.

Henry came in, and the young lady received him with a manner very different from that she had worn down at the works. She was polite, but rather stiff and dignified.

He sat down at her request, and, wondering at himself, entered on the office of preceptor. He took up the carving-tools, and explained the use of several; then offered, by way of illustration, to work on something.

"That will be the best way, much," said Grace quietly, but her eye sparkled.

"I dare say there's some lumber to be found in a great house like this?"

"Lumber? why, there's a large garret devoted to it. Jael, please take him to the lumber-room."

Jael fixed her needle in her work, and laid it down gently on a table near her, then rose and led the way to the lumber-room.

In that invaluable repository Henry soon found two old knobs lying on the ground (a four-poster had been wrecked hard by) and a piece of deal plank jutting out of a mass of things. He pulled hard at the plank; but it was long, and so jammed in by miscellaneous articles, that he could not get it clear.

Jael looked on demurely at his efforts for some time; then she suddenly seized the plank a little higher up. "Now, pull," said she, and gave a tug like a young elephant: out came the plank directly, with a great rattle of dislocated lumber.

"Well, you are a strong one," said Henry.

"Oh, one and one makes two, sir," replied the vigorous damsel, modestly.

"That is true, but you threw your weight into it like a workman. Now hand me that rusty old saw, and I'll cut off as much as we want."

While he was sawing off a piece of the plank, Jael stood and eyed him silently a while. But presently her curiosity oozed out. "If you please, sir, be you really a working man?"

"Why, what else should I be?" was the answer, given rather brusquely.

"A great many gentlefolks comes here as is no better dressed nor you be."

"Dress is no rule. Don't you go and take me for a gentleman, or we sha'n't agree. Wait till I'm as arrogant, and empty, and lazy as they are. I am a workman, and proud of it."

"It's naught to be ashamed on, that's certain," said Jael. "I've carried many a sack of grain up into our granary, and made a few hundred-weight of cheese and butter, besides house-work and farm-work. Bless your heart, I bayn't idle when I be at home."

"And pray where is your home?" asked Henry, looking up a moment, not that he cared one straw.

"If you please, sir, I do come from Cairnhope village. I'm old Nat Dence's daughter. There's two of us, and I'm the youngest. Squire sent me in here, because miss said Hillsborough girls wasn't altogether honest. She is a dear kind young lady; but I do pine for home and the farm at times; and frets about the young calves: they want so much looking after. And sister, she's a-courting, and can't give her mind to 'em as should be. I'll carry the board for you, sir."

"All right," said Henry carelessly; but, as they went along, he thought to himself, "So a skilled workman passes for a gentleman with rustics: fancy that!"

On their return to the drawing-room, Henry asked for a high wooden stool, or chair, and said it would be as well to pin some newspapers over the carpet. A high stool was soon got from the kitchen, and Jael went promptly down on her knees, and crawled about, pinning the newspapers in a large square.

Henry stood apart, superior, and thought to himself, "So much for domestic servitude. What a position for a handsome girl--creeping about on all fours!"

When all was ready, he drew some arabesque forms with his pencil on the board. He then took an exquisite little saw he had invented for this work, and fell upon the board with a rapidity that, contrasted with his previous nonchalance, looked like fury. But he was one of your fast workmen. The lithe saw seemed to twist in his hand like a serpent, and in a very short time he had turned four feet of the board into open-work. He finished the edges off with his cutting tools, and there was a transformation as complete as of linen cloth turned lace.

Grace was delighted. "Shall I ever be able to do that?"

"In half a day. That's not carving; that's trickery. The tool does it all. Before I invented this saw, a good workman would have been a day over that; but now you can do it in half an hour, when you are master of the instrument. And now I'll show you honest work." He took one of the knobs and examined it; then sawed off a piece, and worked on the rest so cunningly with his various cutters, that it grew into a human face toward their very eyes. He even indicated Jael Dence's little flat cap by a means at once simple and ingenious. All the time he was working the women's eyes literally absorbed him; only those of Grace flashed vivid curiosity, Jael's open orbs were fixed with admiration and awe upon his supernatural cleverness.

He now drew some more arabesques on the remaining part of the board, and told Miss Carden she must follow those outlines with the saw, and he would examine her work on Monday morning. He then went off with a quick, independent air, as one whose every minute was gold.

"If you please, miss," said Jael, "is he a real working man, or only a gentleman as makes it his pastime?"

"A gentleman! What an idea! Of course he is a working man. But a very superior person."

"To be sure," continued Jael, not quite convinced, "he don't come up to Squire Raby; but, dear heart, he have a grander way with him than most of the Hillsborough gentlefolks as calls here."

"Nonsense!" said Grace, authoritatively. "Look at his nails."

Henry came twice a week, and his pupil made remarkable progress. She was deferential, attentive, enthusiastic.

By degrees the work led to a little conversation; and that, in due course, expanded into a variety of subjects; and the young lady, to her surprise, found her carver well-read in History and Sciences, and severely accurate in his information, whereas her own, though abundant, was rather loose.

One day she expressed her surprise that he could have found time to be so clever with his fingers and yet cultivate his mind.

"Well," said he, "I was lucky enough to have a good mother. She taught me all she knew, and she gave me a taste for reading; and that has been the making of me; kept me out of the public-house, for one thing."

"Ah! you were fortunate. I lost my mother, sir, when I was but eight years old."

"Oh dear, that was a bad job," said Henry brusquely but kindly.

"A very bad job," said Grace, smiling; but the next moment she suddenly turned her fair head away and tears stole down her cheeks.

Henry looked very sorry, and Jael, without moving, looked at Grace, and opened those sluices, her eyes, and two big drops of sympathy rolled down her comely face in a moment.

That day, when young Little shut the street-door of "Woodbine Villa" and stepped into the road, a sort of dull pain seemed to traverse his chest. It made his heart ache a little, this contrast of the sweet society he had left and the smoky town toward which he now turned his face. He seemed to be ejected from Paradise for the next five days. It was Monday yet he wished the next day was Saturday, and the intervening period could be swept away, so that he might be entering that soft Paradise instead of leaving it.

And this sentiment, once rooted, grew rapidly in an aspiring nature, and a heart that had never yet entertained a serious passion. Now the fair head that bowed over the work so near him, the lovely hand he had so often to direct, and almost to guide, and all the other perfections of mind and body this enchanting girl possessed, crept in at his admiring eyes, and began to steal into his very veins, and fill him with soft complacency. His brusque manner dissolved away, and his voice became low and soft, whenever he was in her delicious presence. He spoke softly to Jael even, if Grace was there. The sturdy workman was enthralled.

Often he wondered at himself. Sometimes he felt alarmed at the strength of his passion and the direction it had taken.

"What," said he, "have I flirted with so many girls in my own way of life, and come away heart-whole, and now to fall in love with a gentlewoman, who would bid her footman show me the door if she knew of my presumption!"

But these misgivings could neither cure him nor cow him. Let him only make money, and become a master instead of a workman, and then he would say to her, "I don't value birth myself, but if you do, why, I am not come of workpeople."

He traced a plan with workmanlike precision:--Profound discretion and self-restraint at "Woodbine Villa;" restless industry and stern self-denial in Hillsborough.

After his day's work he used to go straight to his mother. She gave him a cup of tea, and then they had their chat; and after that the sexes were inverted, so to speak: the man carved fruit, and flowers, and dead woodcocks, the woman read the news and polities of the day, and the essays on labor and capital, and any other articles not too flimsy to bear reading aloud to a man whose time was coin. (There was a free library in Hillsborough, and a mechanic could take out standard books and reviews.) Thus they passed the evening hours agreeably, and usefully too, for Henry sucked in knowledge like a leech, and at the same time carved things that sold well in London. He had a strong inclination to open his heart about Miss Carden. Accordingly, one evening he said, "She lost her mother when she was a child."

"Who lost her mother?" asked Mrs. Little.

"Miss Carden," said Henry, very softly.

The tone was not lost on Mrs. Little's fine and watchful ear; at least her mind seized it a few seconds afterward.

"That is true," said she. "Poor girl! I remember hearing of it. Henry, what is that to you? Don't you trouble your head about that young lady, or she will trouble your heart. I wish you did not go near her."

And then came question upon question, and vague maternal misgivings. Henry parried them as adroitly as he could: but never mentioned Miss Carden's name again.

He thought of her all the more, and counted his gains every week, and began to inquire of experienced persons how much money was wanted to set up a wheel with steam power, and be a master instead of a man. He gathered that a stranger could hardly start fair without £500.

"That is a good lump!" thought Henry: "but I'll have it, if I work night as well as day."

Thus inspired, his life became a sweet delirium. When he walked, he seemed to tread on air: when he forged, his hammer felt a feather in his hand. The mountains in the way looked molehills, and the rainbow tangible, to Youth, and Health, and Hope, and mighty Love.

One afternoon, as he put on his coat and crossed the yard, after a day's work that had passed like a pleasant hour, being gilded with such delightful anticipations, the foreman of the works made him a mysterious signal. Henry saw it, and followed him into his office. Bayne looked carefully out of all the doors, then closed them softly, and his face betrayed anxiety, and even fear.

"Little," said he, almost in a whisper, "you know me: I'm a man of peace, and so for love of peace I'm going to do something that might get me into a wrangle. But you are the civillest chap ever worked under me and the best workman, take you altogether, and I can't bear to see you kept in the dark, when you are the man whose skin--only--if I act like a man to you, will you act like one to me?"

"I will," said Henry; "there's my hand on it."

Then Bayne stepped to his desk, opened it, and took out some letters.

"You must never tell a soul I showed them you, or you will get me into a row with Cheetham; and I want to be at peace in-doors as well as out."

"I give you my word."

"Then read that, to begin."

And he handed him a letter addressed to Mr. Cheetham.

"SIR,--We beg respectfully to draw your attention to a matter, which is of a nature to cause unpleasantness between you and the Trades. We allude to your bringing a workman in from another town to do work that we are informed can be done on the premises by your own hands.

"We assure you it would be more to your interest to work in harmony with the smiths and the handle-makers in your employ, and the trade generally. Yours respectfully,

"THE COMMITTEE OF THE EDGE-TOOL FORGERS' UNION."

Henry colored up at this, and looked grieved; but he said, "I am sorry to be the cause of any unpleasantness. But what can I do?"

"Oh," said Bayne, with a sardonic grin, "they are sure to tell you that, soon or late. Read this:"

No. 2 was dated a week later, and ran thus:--

"MR. CHEETHAM: SIR,--I think you do very ill to annoy a many craftsmen for one. Remember, you have suffered loss and inconvenience whenever you have gone against Trades. We had to visit you last year, and when we came your bands went and your bellows gaped. We have no wish to come again this year, if you will be reasonable. But, sir, you must part with London hand, or take consequences.

"BALAAM."

Henry looked grave. "Can I see a copy of Mr. Cheetham's reply?"

Bayne stared at him, and then laughed in his face, but without the gayety that should accompany a laugh. "Cheetham's reply to Balaam! And where would he send it? To Mr. Beor's lodgings, No. 1 Prophet Place, Old Testament Square. My poor chap, nobody writes replies to these letters. When you get one, you go that minute to the secretary of whatever Union you are wrong with, and you don't argue, or he bids you good-morning; you give in to whatever he asks, and then you get civility; and justice too, according to Trade lights. If you don't do that, and haven't learned what a blessing Peace is, why, you make up your mind to fight the Trade; and if you do, you have to fight them all; and you are safe to get the worst of it, soon or late. Cheetham has taken no notice of these letters. All the worse for him and you too. Read that."

No. 3 ran thus:--

"DEAR SIR,--I take the liberty of addressing you on the subject of your keeping on this knobstick, in defiance of them that has the power to make stones of Hillsborough too hot for you and him. Are you deaf, or blind, or a fool, Jack Cheatem? You may cheat the world, but you don't cheat the devil, nor me. Turn cockney up, with no more ado, or you'll both get kicked to hell some dark night by

"BALAAM'S ASS."

Henry was silent; quite silent. When he did speak, it was to ask why Mr. Cheetham had kept all this from him.

"Because you shouldn't take fright and leave him," was the unhesitating reply.

"For that matter they threaten him more than they do me."

"They warn the master first; but the workman's turn is sure to come, and he gets it hottest, because they have so many ways of doing him. Cheetham, he lives miles from here, and rides in across country, and out again, in daylight. But the days are drawing in, and you have got to pass through these dark streets, where the Trades have a thousand friends, and you not one. Don't you make any mistake: you are in their power; so pray don't copy any hot-headed, wrong-headed gentleman like Cheetham, but speak them fair. Come to terms--if you can--and let us be at peace; sweet, balmy peace."

"Peace is a good thing, no doubt," said Henry, "but" (rather bitterly) "I don't thank Cheetham for letting me run blindfold into trouble, and me a stranger."

"Oh," said Bayne, "he is no worse than the rest, believe me. What does any master care for a man's life? Profit and loss go down in figures; but life--that's a cipher in all their ledgers."

"Oh, come," said Harry, "it is unphilosophical and narrow-minded to fasten on a class the faults of a few individuals, that form a very moderate portion of that class."

Bayne seemed staggered by a blow so polysyllabic; and Henry, to finish him, added, "Where there's a multitude, there's a mixture." Now the first sentence he had culled from the Edinburgh Review, and the second he had caught from a fellow-workman's lips in a public-house; and probably this was the first time the pair of phrases had ever walked out of any man's mouth arm in arm. He went on to say, "And as for Cheetham, he is not a bad fellow, take him altogether. But you are a better for telling me the truth. Forewarned, forearmed."

He went home thoughtful, and not so triumphant and airy as yesterday; but still not dejected, for his young and manly mind summoned its energy and spirit to combat this new obstacle, and his wits went to work.

Being unable to sleep for thinking of what he should do he was the first to reach the works in the morning. He lighted his furnace, and then went and unlocked the room where he worked as a handle maker, and also as a cutler. He entered briskly and opened the window. The gray light of the morning came in, and showed him something on the inside of the door that was not there when he locked it overnight. It was a very long knife, broad toward the handle, but keenly pointed, and double-edged. It was fast in the door, and impaled a letter addressed, in a vile hand--

Henry took hold of the handle to draw the knife out; but the formidable weapon had been driven clean through the door with a single blow.

Then Henry drew back, and, as the confusion of surprise cleared away, the whole thing began to grow on him, and reveal distinct and alarming features.

The knife was not one which the town manufactured in the way of business, it was a long, glittering blade, double-edged, finely pointed, and exquisitely tempered. It was not a tool, but a weapon.

Why was it there, and, above all, how did it come there?

He distinctly remembered locking the door overnight. Indeed, he had found it locked, and the window-shutters bolted; yet there was this deadly weapon, and on its point a letter, the superscription of which looked hostile and sinister.

He drew the note gently across the edge of the keen knife, and the paper parted like a cobweb. He took it to the window and read it. It ran thus:--

"This knifs wun of too made ekspres t'other is for thy hart if thou doesnt harken Trade and leve Chetm. Is thy skin thicks dore thinks thou if not turn up and back to Lundon or I cum again and rip thy ----carkiss with feloe blade to this thou ---- cokny.

"SLIPER JACK."

Any one who reads it by the fireside may smile at the incongruous mixture of a sanguinary menace with bad spelling. But deeds of blood had often followed these scrawls in Hillsborough, and Henry knew it: and, indeed, he who can not spell his own name correctly is the very man to take his neighbor's life without compunction; since mercy is a fruit of knowledge, and cruelty of ignorance.

And then there was something truly chilling in the mysterious entrance of this threat on a dagger's point into a room he had locked overnight. It implied supernatural craft and power. After this, where could a man be safe from these all-penetrating and remorseless agents of a secret and irresponsible tribunal.

Henry sat down awhile, and pored over the sanguinary scrawl, and glanced from it with a shudder at the glittering knife. And, while he was in this state of temporary collapse, the works filled, the Power moved, the sonorous grindstones revolved, and every man worked at his ease, except one, the best of them all beyond comparison.

He went to his friend Bayne, and said in a broken voice, "They have put me in heart for work; given me a morning dram. Look here." Bayne was shocked, but not surprised. "It is the regular routine," said he. "They begin civil; but if you don't obey, they turn it over to the scum."

"Do you think my life is really in danger?"

"No, not yet; I never knew a man molested on one warning. This is just to frighten you. If you were to take no notice, you'd likely get another warning, or two, at most; and then they'd do you, as sure as a gun."

"Do me?"

"Oh, that is the Hillsborough word. It means to disable a man from work. Sometimes they lie in wait in these dark streets, and fracture his skull with life-preservers; or break his arm, or cut the sinew of his wrist; and that they call doing him. Or, if it is a grinder, they'll put powder in his trough, and then the sparks of his own making fire it, and scorch him, and perhaps blind him for life; that's doing him. They have gone as far as shooting men with shot, and even with a bullet, but never so as to kill the man dead on the spot. They do him. They are skilled workmen, you know; well, they are skilled workmen at violence and all, and it is astonishing how they contrive to stop within an inch of murder. They'll chance it though sometimes with their favorite gunpowder. If you're very wrong with the trade, and they can't do you any other way, they'll blow your house up from the cellar, or let a can of powder down the chimney, with a lighted fuse, or fling a petard in at the window, and they take the chance of killing a houseful of innocent people, to get at the one that's on the black books of the trade, and has to be done."

"The beasts! I'll buy a six-shooter. I'll meet craft with craft, and force with force."

"What can you do against ten thousand? No; go you at once to the Secretary of the Edge-Tool Grinders, and get your trade into his Union. You will have to pay; but don't mind that. Cheetham will go halves."

"I'll go at dinner-time."

"And why not now?"

"Because," said Henry, with a candor all his own, "I'm getting over my fright a bit, and my blood is beginning to boil at being threatened by a sneak, who wouldn't stand before me one moment in that yard, knife or no knife."

Bayne smiled a friendly but faint smile, and shook his head with grave disapprobation, and said, with wonder, "Fancy postponing Peace!"

Henry went to his forge and worked till dinner-time. Nay, more, was a beautiful whistler, and always whistled a little at his work: so to-day he whistled a great deal: in fact, he over-whistled.

At dinner-time he washed his face and hands and put on his coat to go out.

But he had soon some reason to regret that he had not acted on Bayne's advice to the letter. There had been a large trade's meeting overnight, and the hostility to the London craftsman had spread more widely, in consequence of remarks that had been there made. This emboldened the lower class of workmen, who already disliked him out of pure envy, and had often scowled at him in silence; and, now, as he passed them, they spoke at him, in their peculiar language, which the great friend and supporter of mechanics in general, the Hillsborough Liberal, subsequently christened "THE DASH DIALECT."

"We want no ---- cockneys here, to steal our work."

"Did ever a ---- anvil-man handle his own blades in Hillsborough?"

"Not till this ---- knobstick came," said another.

Henry turned sharp round upon them haughtily, and such was the power of his prompt defiant attitude, and his eye, which flashed black lightning, that there was a slight movement of recoil among the actual speakers. They recovered it immediately, strong in numbers; but in that same moment Little also recovered his discretion, and he had the address to step briskly toward the gate and call out the porter; he said to him in rather a loud voice, for all to hear, "if anybody asks for Henry Little, say he has gone to the Secretary of the Edge-Tool Forgers' Union." He then went out of the works; but, as he went, he heard some respectable workman say to the scum, "Come, shut up now. It is in better hands than yours."

Mr. Jobson, the Secretary of the Edge-Tool Forgers, was not at home, but his servant-girl advised Little to try the "Rising Sun;" and in the parlor of that orb he found Mr. Jobson, in company with other magnates of the same class, discussing a powerful leader of the Hillsborough Liberal, in which was advocated the extension of the franchise, a measure calculated to throw prodigious power into the hands of Hillsborough operatives, because of their great number, and their habit of living each workman in a tenement of his own, however small.

Little waited till the Liberal had received its meed of approbation, and then asked respectfully if he might speak to Mr. Jobson on a trade matter. "Certainly," said Mr. Jobson. "Who are you?"

"My name is Little. I make the carving-tools at Cheetham's."

"I'll go home with you; my house is hard by."

When they got to the house, Jobson told him to sit down, and asked him, in a smooth and well-modulated voice, what was the nature of the business. This query, coming from him, who had set the stone rolling that bade fair to crush him, rather surprised Henry. He put his hand into his pocket, and produced the threatening note, but said nothing as to the time or manner of its arrival.

Mr. Jobson perused it carefully, and then returned it to Henry. "What have we to do with this?" and he looked quite puzzled.

"Why, sir, it is the act of your Union."

"You are sadly misinformed, Mr. Little. We never threaten. All we do is to remind the master that, if he does not do certain things, certain other things will probably be done by us; and this we wrap up in the kindest way."

"But, sir, you wrote to Cheetham against me."

"Did we? Then it will be in my letter-book." He took down a book, examined it, and said, "You are quite right. Here's a copy of the letter. Now surely, sir, comparing the language, the manners, and the spelling, with that of the ruffian whose scrawl you received this morning--"

"Then you disown the ruffian's threat?"

"Most emphatically. And if you can trace it home, he shall smart for interfering in our business."

"Oh, if the trade disowns the blackguard, I can despise him. But you can't wonder at my thinking all these letters were steps of the same--yes, and Mr. Bayne thought so too; for he said this was the regular routine, and ends in doing a poor fellow for gaining his bread."

Mr. Jobson begged to explain.

"Many complaints are brought to us, who advise the trades. When they are frivolous, we are unwilling to disturb the harmony of employers and workmen; we reason with the complainant, and the thing dies away. When the grievance is substantial, we take it out of the individual's hands and lay it before the working committee. A civil note is sent to the master; or a respectable member of the committee calls on him, and urges him to redress the grievance, but always in kind and civil terms. The master generally assents: experience has taught him it is his wisest course. But if he refuses, we are bound to report the refusal to a larger committee, and sometimes a letter emanates from them, reminding the master that he has been a loser before by acts of injustice, and hinting that he may be a loser again. I do not quite approve this form of communication. But certainly it has often prevented the mischief from spreading further. Well, but perhaps he continues rebellious. What follows? We can't lock up facts that affect the trade; we are bound to report the case at the next general meeting. It excites comments, some of them perhaps a little intemperate; the lower kind of workmen get inflamed with passion, and often, I am sorry to say, write ruffianly letters, and now and then do ruffianly acts, which disgrace the town, and are strongly reprobated by us. Why, Mr. Little, it has been my lot to send a civil remonstrance, written with my own hand, in pretty fair English--for a man who plied bellows and hammer twenty years of my life--and be treated with silent contempt; and two months after to be offering a reward of twenty or thirty pounds, for the discovery of some misguided man, that had taken on himself to right this very matter with a can of gunpowder, or some such coarse expedient."

"Yes, but, sir, what hurts me is, you don't consider me to be worth a civil note. You only remonstrated with Cheetham."

"You can't wonder at that. Our trade hasn't been together many years: and what drove us together? The tyranny of our employers. What has kept us together? The bitter experience of hard work and little pay, whenever we were out of union. Those who now direct the trades are old enough to remember when we were all ground down to the dust by the greedy masters; and therefore it is natural, when a grievance arises, we should be inclined to look to those old offenders for redress in the first instance. Sometimes the masters convince us the fault lies with workmen; and then we trouble the master no more than we are forced to do in order to act upon the offenders. But, to come to the point: what is your proposal?"

"I beg to be admitted into the union."

"What union?"

"Why, of course, the one I have offended, through ignorance. The edge-tool forgers."

Jobson shook his head, and said he feared there were one or two objections.

Henry saw it was no use bidding low. "I'll pay £15 down," said he, "and I'll engage not to draw relief from your fund, unless disabled by accident or violence."

"I will submit your offer to the trade," said Jobson. He added, "Then there, I conclude, the matter rests for the present."

Henry interpreted this to mean that he had nothing to apprehend, unless his proposal should be rejected. He put the £15 down on the table, though Mr. Jobson told him that was premature, and went off as light as a feather. Being nice and clean, and his afternoon's work spoiled, he could not resist the temptation; he went to "Woodbine Villa." He found Miss Carden at home, and she looked quietly pleased at his unexpected arrival: but Jael's color came and went, and her tranquil bosom rose and fell slowly, but grandly, for a minute, as she lowered her head over her work.

This was a heavenly change to Henry Little. Away from the deafening workshop, and the mean jealousies and brutality of his inferiors, who despised him, to the presence of a beautiful and refined girl, who was his superior, yet did not despise him. From sin to purity, from din to cleanliness, from war to peace, from vilest passions to Paradise.

Her smile had never appeared so fascinating, her manner never so polite yet placid. How softly and comfortably she and her ample dress nestled into the corner of the sofa and fitted it! How white her nimble hand! how bright her delicious face! How he longed to kiss her exquisite hand, or her little foot, or her hem, or the ground she walked on, or something she had touched, or her eye had dwelt on.

But he must not even think too much of such delights, lest he should show his heart too soon. So, after a short lesson, he proposed to go into the lumber-room and find something to work upon. "Yes, do," said Grace. "I would go too; but no; it was my palace of delight for years, and its treasures inexhaustible. I will not go to be robbed of one more illusion, it is just possible I might find it really is what the profane in this house call it--a lumber-room--and not what memory paints it, a temple of divine curiosities." And so she sent them off, and she set herself to feel old--"oh, so old!"

And presently Henry came back, laden with a great wooden bust of Erin, that had been the figure-head of a wrecked schooner; and set it down, and told her he should carve that into a likeness of herself, and she must do her share of the work.

Straightway she forgot she was worn out; and clapped her hands, and her eyes sparkled. And the floor was prepared, and Henry went to work like one inspired, and the chips flew in every direction, and the paint was chiseled away in no time, and the wood proved soft and kindly, and just the color of a delicate skin, and Henry said, "The Greek Statues, begging their pardons, have all got hair like mops; but this shall have real hair, like your own: and the silk dress, with the gloss on; and the lace; but the face, the expression, how can I ever--?"

"Oh, never mind them," cried Grace. "Jael, this is too exciting. Please go and tell them 'not at home' to anybody."

Then came a pretty picture: the workman, with his superb hand, brown and sinewy, yet elegant and shapely as a duchess's, and the fingers almost as taper, and his black eye that glowed like a coal over the model, which grew under his masterly strokes, now hard, now light: the enchanting girl who sat to him, and seemed on fire with curiosity and innocent admiration: and the simple rural beauty, that plied the needle, and beamed mildly with demure happiness, and shot a shy glance upward now and then.

Yes, Love was at his old mischievous game.

Henry now lived in secret for Grace Carden, and Jael was garnering Henry into her devoted heart, unobserved by the object of her simple devotion. Yet, of the three, these two, that loved with so little encouragement, were the happiest. To them the world was Heaven this glorious afternoon. Time, strewing roses as he went, glided so sweetly and so swiftly, that they started with surprise when the horizontal beams glorified the windows, and told them the brightest day of their lives was drawing to its end.

Ah, stay a little while longer for them, Western Sun. Stand still, not as in the cruel days of old, to glare upon poor, beaten, wounded, panting warriors, and rob them of their last chance, the shelter of the night: but to prolong these holy rapturous hours of youth, and hope, and first love in bosoms unsullied by the world--the golden hours of life, that glow so warm, and shine so bright, and flee so soon; and return in this world--never more!

Henry Little began this bust in a fervid hour, and made great progress the first day; but as the work grew on him, it went slower and slower; for his ambitious love drove him to attempt beauties of execution that were without precedent in this kind of wood-carving; and, on the other hand, the fastidiousness of a true craftsman made him correct his attempts again and again. As to those mechanical parts, which he intrusted at first to his pupil, she fell so far short of his ideal even in these, that he told her bluntly she must strike work for the present: he could not have this spoiled.

Grace thought it hard she might not be allowed to spoil her own image; however, she submitted, and henceforth her lesson was confined to looking on. And she did look on with interest, and, at last, with profound admiration. Hitherto she had thought, with many other persons, that, if a man's hand was the stronger, a woman's was the neater; but now she saw the same hand, which had begun by hewing away the coarse outlines of the model, bestow touches of the chisel so unerring and effective, yet so exquisitely delicate, that she said to herself, "No woman's hand could be so firm, yet so feather-like, as all this."

And the result was as admirable as the process. The very texture of the ivory forehead began to come under those master-touches, executed with perfect and various instruments: and, for the first time perhaps in the history of this art, a bloom, more delicate far than that of a plum, crept over the dimpled cheek. But, indeed, when love and skill work together, expect a masterpiece.

Henry worked on it four afternoons, the happiest he had ever known. There was the natural pleasure of creating, and the distinct glory and delight of reproducing features so beloved; and to these joys were added the pleasure of larger conversation. The model gave Grace many opportunities of making remarks, or asking questions, and Henry contrived to say so many things in answer to one. Sculptor and sitter made acquaintance with each other's minds over the growing bust.

And then the young ladies and gentlemen dropped in, and gazed, and said such wonderfully silly things, and thereby left their characters behind them as fruitful themes for conversation. In short, topics were never wanting now.

As for Jael, she worked, and beamed, and pondered every word her idol uttered, but seldom ventured to say anything, till he was gone, and then she prattled fast enough about him.

The work drew near completion. The hair, not in ropes, as heretofore, but its silken threads boldly and accurately shown, yet not so as to cord the mass, and unsatin it quite. The silk dress; the lace collar; the blooming cheek, with its every dimple and incident; all these were completed, and one eyebrow, a masterpiece in itself. This carved eyebrow was a revelation, and made everybody who saw it wonder at the conventional substitutes they had hitherto put up with in statuary of all sorts, when the eyebrow itself was so beautiful, and might it seems have been imitated, instead of libeled, all these centuries.

But beautiful works, and pleasant habits, seem particularly liable to interruption. Just when the one eyebrow was finished, and when Jael Dence had come to look on Saturday and Monday as the only real days in the week, and when even Grace Carden was brighter on those days, and gliding into a gentle complacent custom, suddenly a Saturday came and went, but Little did not appear.

Jael was restless.

Grace was disappointed, but contented to wait till Monday.

Monday came and went, but no Henry Little.

Jael began to fret and sigh; and, after two more blank weeks, she could bear the mystery no longer. "If you please, miss," said she, "shall I go to that place where he works?"

"Where who works?" inquired Grace, rather disingenuously.

"Why, the dark young man, miss," said Jael, blushing deeply.

Grace reflected and curiosity struggled with discretion; but discretion got the better, being aided by self-respect. "No, Jael," said she; "he is charming, when he is here; but, when he gets away, he is not always so civil as he might be. I had to go twice after him. I shall not go nor send a third time. It really is too bad of him."

"Dear heart," pleaded Jael, "mayhap he is not well."

"Then he ought to write and say so. No, no; he is a radical, and full of conceit; and he has done this one eyebrow, and then gone off laughing and saying, 'Now, let us see if the gentry can do the other amongst them.' If he doesn't come soon, I'll do the other eyebrow myself."

"Mayhap he will never come again," said Jael.

"Oh, yes, he will," said Grace, mighty cunningly; "he is as fond of coming here as we are of having him. Not that I'm at all surprised; for the fact is, you are very pretty, extremely pretty, abominably pretty."

"I might pass in Cairnhope town," said Jael, modestly, "but not here. The moon goes for naught when the sun is there. He don't come here for me."

This sudden elegance of language, and Jael's tone of dignified despondency, silenced Grace, somehow, and made her thoughtful. She avoided the subject for several days. Indeed, when Saturday came, not a word was said about the defaulter: it was only by her sending for Jael to sit with her, and by certain looks, and occasional restlessness, she betrayed the slightest curiosity or expectation.

Jael sat and sewed, and often looked quickly up at the window, as some footstep passed, and then looked down again and sighed.

Young Little never came. He seemed to have disappeared from both their lives; quietly disappeared.

Next day, Sunday, Jael came to Miss Carden, after morning church, and said, meekly, "if you please, miss, may I go home?"

"Oh, certainly," said Grace, a little haughtily. "What for?"

Jael hung her head, and said she was not used to be long away. Then she lifted her head, and her great candid eyes, and spoke more frankly. "I feel to be drawed home. Something have been at me all the night to that degree as I couldn't close my eyes. I could almost feel it, like a child's hand, a pulling me East. I'm afeared father's ill, or may be the calves are bleating for me, that is better acquaint with them than sister Patty is. And Hillsborough air don't seem to 'gree with me now not altogether as it did at first. If you please, miss, to let me go; and then I'll come back when I'm better company than I be now. Oh dear! oh dear!"

"Why, Jael, my poor girl, what is the matter?"

"I don't know, miss. But I feel very unked."

"Are you not happy with me?"

"'Tis no fault of yourn, miss," said Jael, rustic, but womanly.

"Then you are not happy here."

No reply, but two clear eyes began to fill to the very brim.

Grace coaxed her, and said, "Speak to me like a friend. You know, after all, you are not my servant. I can't possibly part with you altogether; I have got to like you so: but, of course, you shall go home for a little while, if you wish it very, very much."

"Indeed I do, miss," said Jael. "Please forgive me, but my heart feels like lead in my bosom." And, with these words, the big tears ran over, and chased one another down her cheeks.

Then Grace, who was very kind-hearted, begged her, in a very tearful voice, not to cry: she should go home for a week, a fortnight, a month even. "There, there, you shall go to-morrow, poor thing."

Now it is a curious fact, and looks like animal magnetism or something, but the farm-house, to which Jael had felt so mysteriously drawn all night, contained, at that moment, besides its usual inmates, one Henry Little: and how he came there is an important part of this tale, which I must deal with at once.

While Henry was still visiting "Woodbine Villa," as related above, events of a very different character from those soft scenes were taking place at the works. His liberal offer to the Edge-Tool Forgers had been made about a week, when, coming back one day from dinner to his forge, he found the smoky wall written upon with chalk, in large letters, neatly executed:--

"MARY."

He was not alarmed this time, but vexed. He went and complained to Bayne; and that worthy came directly and contemplated the writing, in silence, for about a minute. Then he gave a weary sigh, and said, with doleful resignation, "Take the chalk, and write. There it is."

Henry took the chalk, and prepared to write Bayne's mind underneath Mary's. Bayne dictated:--

"But that is not true," objected Henry, turning round, with the chalk in his hand.

"It will be true, in half an hour. We are going to Parkin, the Handlers' Secretary."

"What, another £15! This is an infernal swindle."

"What isn't?" said Bayne, cynically.

Henry then wrote as desired; and they went together to Mr. Parkin.

Mr. Parkin was not at home. But they hunted him from pillar to post, and caught him, at last, in the bar-parlor of "The Packsaddle." He knew Bayne well, and received him kindly, and, on his asking for a private interview, gave a wink to two persons who were with him: they got up directly, and went out.

"What, is there any thing amiss between you and the trade?" inquired Mr. Parkin, with an air of friendly interest.

Bayne smiled, not graciously, but sourly. "Come, come, sir, that is a farce you and I have worn out this ten years. This is the London workman himself, come to excuse himself to Mary and Co., for not applying to them before: and the long and the short is, he offers the Handlers the same as he has the Smiths, fifteen down, and to pay his natty money, but draw no scale, unless disabled. What d'y say? Yes, or no?"

"I'll lay Mr. Little's proposal before the committee."

"Thank you, sir," said Little. "And, meantime, I suppose I may feel safe against violence, from the members of your union?"

"Violence!" said Mr. Parkin, turning his eye inward, as if he was interrogating the centuries. Then to Mr. Bayne, "Pray, sir, do you remember any deed of darkness that our Union has ever committed, since we have been together; and that is twelve years?"

"Well, Mr. Parkin," said Bayne, "if you mean deeds of blood, and deeds of gunpowder, et cetera--why, no, not one: and it is greatly to your honor. But, mind you, if a master wants his tanks tapped and his hardening-liquor run into the shore or his bellows to be ripped, his axle-nuts to vanish, his wheel-bands to go and hide in a drain or a church belfry, and his scythe-blades to dive into a wheel-dam, he has only to be wrong with your Union, and he'll be accommodated as above. I speak from experience."

"Oh, rattening!" said Mr. Parkin. "That is a mighty small matter."

"It is small to you, that are not in the oven, where the bread is baked, or cooled, or burnt. But whatever parts the grindstones from the power, and the bellows from the air, and the air from the fire, makes a hole in the master's business to-day, and a hole in the workman's pocket that day six months. So, for heaven's sake, let us be right with you. Little's is the most friendly and liberal offer that any workman ever made to any Union. Do, pray, close with it, and let us be at peace; sweet--balmy--peace."

Parkin declared he shared that desire: but was not the committee. Then, to Henry: "I shall put your case as favorably as my conscience will let me. Meantime, of course, the matter rests as it is."

They then parted; and Henry, as he returned home, thanked Bayne heartily. He said this second £15 had been a bitter pill at first; but now he was glad he had offered it. "I would not leave Hillsborough for fifteen hundred pounds."

Two days after this promising interview with Mr. Parkin, Henry received a note, the envelope of which showed him it came from Mr. Jobson. He opened it eagerly, and with a good hope that its object was to tell him he was now a member of the Edge-Tool Forgers' Union.

The letter, however, ran thus:--

"DEAR SIR,--I hear, with considerable surprise, that you continue to forge blades and make handles for Mr. Cheetham. On receipt of this information I went immediately to Mr. Parkin, and he assured me that he came to the same terms with you as I did. He says he intimated politely, but plainly, that he should expect you not to make any more carving-tool handles for Mr. Cheetham, till his committee had received your proposal. He now joins me in advising you to strike work for the present. Hillsborough is surrounded by beautiful scenes, which it might gratify an educated workman to inspect, during the unavoidable delay caused by the new and very important questions your case has raised.--"Yours obediently,

"SAML. JOBSON.

"P.S.--A respectable workman was with me yesterday, and objected that you receive from Mr. Cheetham a higher payment than the list price. Can you furnish me with a reply to this, as it is sure to be urged at the trade meeting."

When he read this, Little's blood boiled, especially at the cool advice to lay down his livelihood, and take up scenery: and he dashed off a letter of defiance. He showed it to Bayne, and it went into the fire directly. "That is all right," said this worthy. "You have written your mind, like a man. Now sit down, and give them treacle for their honey--or you'll catch pepper."

Henry groaned, and writhed, but obeyed.

He had written his defiance in three minutes. It took him an hour to produce the following:--

"DEAR SIR,--I am sorry for the misunderstanding. I did not, for a moment, attach that meaning to any thing that fell either from you or Mr. Parkin.

"I must now remind you that, were I to strike work entirely, Mr. Cheetham could discharge me, and even punish me, for breach of contract. All I can do is to work fewer hours than I have done: and I am sure you will be satisfied with that, if you consider that the delay in the settlement of this matter rests with you, and not with me,

"I am yours respectfully,

HENRY LITTLE.

"I furnish you, as requested, with two replies to the objection of a respectable workman that I am paid above the list price.

"1.--To sell skilled labor below the statement price is a just offense, and injury to trade. But to obtain above the statement price is to benefit trade. The high price, that stands alone to-day, will not stand alone forever. It gets quoted in bargains, and draws prices up to it. That has been proved a thousand times.

"2.--It is not under any master's skin to pay a man more than he is worth. If I get a high price, it is because I make a first-rate article. If a man has got superior knowledge, he is not going to give it away to gratify envious ignorance."

To this, in due course, he received from Jobson the following:

"DEAR SIR,--I advised you according to my judgment and experience: but, doubtless, you are the best judge of your own affairs."

And that closed the correspondence with the Secretaries.

The gentle Jobson and the polite Parkin had retired from the correspondence with their air of mild regret and placid resignation just three days, when young Little found a dirty crumpled letter on his anvil, written in pencil. It ran thus:--

"Turn up or youl wish you had droped it. Youl be made so as youl never do hands turn agin, an never know what hurt you.

(Signed) "MOONRAKER."

Henry swore.

When he had sworn (and, as a Briton, I think he had denied himself that satisfaction long enough), he caught up a strip of steel with his pincers, shoved it into the coals, heated it, and, in half a minute, forged two long steel nails. He then nailed this letter to his wall, and wrote under it in chalk, "I offer £10 reward to any one who will show me the coward who wrote this, but was afraid to sign it. The writing is peculiar, and can easily be identified."

He also took the knife that had been so ostentatiously fixed in his door, and carried it about him night and day, with a firm resolve to use it in self-defense, if necessary.

And now the plot thickened: the decent workmen in Cheetham's works were passive; they said nothing offensive, but had no longer the inclination, even if they had the power, to interfere and restrain the lower workmen from venting their envy and malice. Scarcely a day passed without growls and scowls. But Little went his way haughtily, and affected not to see, nor hear them.

However, one day, at dinner-time, he happened, unluckily, to be detained by Bayne in the yard, when the men came out: and two or three of the roughs took this opportunity and began on him at once, in the Dash Dialect, of course; they knew no other.

A great burly forger, whose red matted hair was powdered with coal-dust, and his face bloated with habitual intemperance, planted himself insolently before Henry, and said, in a very loud voice, "How many more trade meetings are we to have for one ---- knobstick?"

Henry replied, in a moment, "Is it my fault if your shilly-shallying committees can't say yes or no to £15? You'd say yes to it, wouldn't you, sooner than go to bed sober?"

This sally raised a loud laugh at the notorious drunkard's expense, and checked the storm, as a laugh generally does.

But men were gathering round, and a workman who had heard the raised voices, and divined the row, ran out of the works, with his apron full of blades, and his heart full of mischief. It was a grinder of a certain low type, peculiar to Hillsborough, but quite common there, where grinders are often the grandchildren of grinders. This degenerate face was more canine than human; sharp as a hatchet, and with forehead villainously low; hardly any chin; and--most characteristic trait of all--the eyes, pale in color, and tiny in size, appeared to have come close together, to consult, and then to have run back into the very skull, to get away from the sparks, which their owner, and his sire, and his grandsire, had been eternally creating.

This greyhound of a grinder flung down a lot of dull bluish blades, warm from the forge, upon a condemned grindstone that was lying in the yard; and they tinkled.

"---- me, if I grind cockney blades!" said he.

This challenge fired a sympathetic handle-maker. "Grinders are right," said he. "We must be a ---- mean lot and all, to handle his ---- work."

"He has been warned enough; but he heeds noane."

"Hustle him out o' works."

"Nay, hit him o'er th' head and fling him into shore."

With these menacing words, three or four roughs advanced on him, with wicked eyes; and the respectable workmen stood, like stone statues, in cold and terrible neutrality; and Henry, looking round, in great anxiety, found that Bayne had withdrawn.

He ground his teeth, and stepped back to the wall, to have all the assailants in the front. He was sternly resolute, though very pale, and, by a natural impulse, put his hand into his side-pocket, to feel if he had a weapon. The knife was there, the deadly blade with which his enemies themselves had armed him; and, to those who could read faces, there was death in the pale cheek and gleaming eye of this young man, so sorely tried.

At this moment, a burly gentleman walked into the midst of them, as smartly as Van Amburgh amongst his tigers, and said steadily, "What is to do now, lads?" It was Cheetham himself, Bayne knew he was in the office, and had run for him in mortal terror, and sent him to keep the peace. "They insult me, sir," said Henry; "though I am always civil to them; and that grinder refuses to grind my blades, there."

"Is that so? Step out, my lad. Did you refuse to grind those blades?"

"Ay," said the greyhound-man sullenly.

"Then put on your coat, and leave my premises this minute."

"He is entitled to a week's warning, Mr. Cheetham," said one of the decent workmen, respectfully, but resolutely; speaking now for the first time.

"You are mistaken, sir," replied Mr. Cheetham, in exactly the same tone. (No stranger could have divined the speakers were master and man.) "He has vitiated his contract by publicly refusing to do his work. He'll get nothing from me but his wages up to noon this day. But you can have a week's warning, if you want it."

"Nay, sir. I've naught against you, for my part. But they say it will come to that, if you don't turn Little up."

"Why, what's his fault? Come now; you are a man. Speak up."

"Nay, I've no quarrel with the man. But he isn't straight with the trade."

"That is the secretaries' fault, not mine," said Henry. "They can't see I've brought a new trade in, that hurts no old trade, and will spread, and bring money into the town."

"We are not so ---- soft as swallow that," said the bloated smith. "Thou's just come t' Hillsborough to learn forging, and when thou'st mastered that, off to London, and take thy ---- trade with thee."

Henry colored to the brow at the inferior workman's vanity and its concomitant detraction. But he governed himself, by a mighty effort, and said, "Oh, that's your grievance now, is it? Mr. Cheetham--sir--will you ask some respectable grinder to examine these blades of mine?"

"Certainly. You are right, Little. The man to judge a forger's work is a grinder, and not another forger. Reynolds, just take a look at them, will ye?"

A wet grinder of a thoroughly different type and race from the greyhound, stepped forward. He was thick-set in body, fresh-colored, and of a square manly countenance. He examined the blades carefully, and with great interest.

"Well," said Henry, "were they forged by a smith, or a novice that is come here to learn anvil work?"

Reynolds did not reply to him, nor to Mr. Cheetham: he turned to the men. "Mates, I'm noane good at lying. Hand that forged these has naught to learn in Hillsbro', nor any other shop."

"Thank you, Mr. Reynolds," said Henry, in a choking voice. "That is the first gleam of justice that I--" He could say no more.

"Come, don't you turn soft for a word or two," said Cheetham. "You'll wear all this out in time. Go to the office. I have something to say to you."

The something was said. It amounted to this--"Stand by me and I'll stand by you."

"Well, sir," said Henry, "I think I must leave you if the committees refuse my offer. It is hard for one man to fight a couple of trades in such a place as this. But I'm firm in one thing: until those that govern the unions say 'no' to my offer, I shall go on working, and the scum of the trades sha'n't frighten me away from my forge."

"That's right; let the blackguards bluster. Bayne tells me you have had another anonymous."

"Yes, sir."

"Well, look here: you must take care of yourself, outside the works; but, I'll take care of you inside. Here, Bayne, write a notice that, if any man molests, intimidates, or affronts Mr. Little, in my works, I'll take him myself to the town-hall, and get him two months directly. Have somebody at the gate to put a printed copy of that into every man's hand as he leaves."

"Thank you, sir!" said Henry, warmly. "But ought not the police to afford me protection, outside?"

"The police! You might as well go to the beadle. No; change your lodging, if you think they know it. Don't let them track you home. Buy a brace of pistols, and, if they catch you in a dark place, and try to do you, give them a barrel or two before they can strike a blow. No one of them will ever tell the police, not if you shot his own brother dead at that game. The law is a dead letter here, sir. You've nothing to expect from it, and nothing to fear."

"Good heavens! Am I in England?"

"In England? No. You are in Hillsborough."

This epigram put Cheetham in good humor with himself, and, when Henry told him he did not feel quite safe, even in his own forge, nor in his handling-room, and gave his reasons, "Oh," said cheerful Cheetham, "that is nothing. Yours is a box-lock; the blackguard will have hid in the works at night, and taken the lock off, left his writing, and then screwed the lock on again: that is nothing to any Hillsborough hand. But I'll soon stop that game. Go you to Chestnut Street, and get two first-class Bramah locks. There's a pocket knife forge upstairs, close to your handling-room. I'll send the pocket-knife hand down-stairs, and you fasten the Bramah locks on both doors, and keep the keys yourself. See to that now at once: then your mind will be easy. And I shall be in the works all day now, and every day: come to me directly, if there is any thing fresh."

Henry's forge was cold, by this time; so he struck work, and spent the afternoon in securing his two rooms with the Bramah locks. He also took Cheetham's advice in another particular. Instead of walking home, he took a cab, and got the man to drive rapidly to a certain alley. There he left the cab, ran down the alley, and turned a corner, and went home round about. He doubled like a hare, and dodged like a criminal evading justice.

But the next morning he felt a pleasing sense of security when he opened his forge-room with the Bramah key, and found no letters nor threats of any kind had been able to penetrate.

Moreover, all this time you will understand he was visiting "Woodbine Cottage" twice a week, and carving Grace Carden's bust.

Those delightful hours did much to compensate him for his troubles in the town, and were even of some service to him in training him to fence with the trades of Hillsborough: for at "Woodbine Villa" he had to keep an ardent passion within the strict bounds of reverence, and in the town he had constantly to curb another passion, wrath, and keep it within the bounds of prudence. These were kindred exercises of self-restraint, and taught him self-government beyond his years. But what he benefited most by, after all, was the direct and calming effect upon his agitated heart, and irritated nerves, that preceded, and accompanied, and followed these sweet, tranquilizing visits. They were soft, solacing, and soothing; they were periodical and certain, he could count on leaving his cares and worries, twice every week, at the door of that dear villa; and, when he took them up again, they were no longer the same; heavenly balm had been shed over them, and over his boiling blood.

One Saturday he heard, by a side-wind, that the Unions at a general meeting had debated his case, and there had been some violent speeches, and no decision come to; but the majority adverse to him. This discouraged him sadly, and his yearning heart turned all the more toward his haven of rest, and the hours, few but blissful, that awaited him.

About eleven o'clock, that same day, the postman brought him a letter, so vilely addressed, that it had been taken to two or three places, on speculation, before it reached its destination.

Little saw at once it was another anonymous communication. But he was getting callous to these missives, and he even took it with a certain degree of satisfaction. "Well done, Bramah! Obliged to send their venom by post now." This was the feeling uppermost in his mind. In short, he opened the letter with as much contempt as anger.

But he had no sooner read the foul scrawl, than his heart died within him.

"Thou's sharp but not sharp enow. We know where thou goes courting up hill. Window is all glass and ripe for a Peter shall blow the house tatums. There's the stuff in Hillsbro and the men that have done others so, and will do her job as wells thine. Powders a good servant but a bad master.

"ONE WHO MEANS DOING WHAT HE SAYS."

At this diabolical threat, young Little leaned sick and broken over the handle of his bellows.

Then he got up, and went to Mr. Cheetham, and said, patiently, "Sir, I am sorry to say I must leave you this very day."

"Don't say that, Little, don't say that."

"Oh it is with a heavy heart, sir; and I shall always remember your kindness. But a man knows when he is beat. And I'm beat now." He hung his head in silence awhile. Then he said, in a faint voice, "This is what has done it, sir," and handed him the letter.

Mr. Cheetham examined it, and said, "I am not surprised at your being taken aback by this. But it's nothing new to us; we have all been threatened in this form. Why, the very last time I fought the trades, my wife was threatened I should be brought home on a shutter, with my intestines sweeping the ground. That was the purport, only it was put vernacular and stronger. And they reminded me that the old gal's clothes (that is Mrs. Cheetham: she is only twenty-six, and the prettiest lass in Coventry, and has a row of ivories that would do your heart good: now these Hillsborough hags haven't got a set of front teeth among 'em, young or old). Well, they told me the old gal's clothes could easily be spoiled, and her doll's face and all, with a penn'orth of vitriol."

"The monsters!"

"But it was all brag. These things are threatened fifty times, for once they are done."

"I shall not risk it. My own skin, if you like. But not hers: never, Mr. Cheetham: oh, never; never!"

"Well, but," said Mr. Cheetham, "she is in no danger so long as you keep away from her. They might fling one of their petards in at the window, if you were there; but otherwise, never, in this world. No, no, Little, they are not so bad as that. They have blown up a whole household, to get at the obnoxious party; but they always make sure he is there first."

Bayne was appealed to, and confirmed this; and, with great difficulty, they prevailed on Little to remain with them, until the Unions should decide; and to discontinue his visits to the house on the hill in the meantime. I need hardly say they had no idea the house on the hill was "Woodbine Villa."

He left them, and, sick at heart, turned away from Heath Hill, and strolled out of the lower part of the town, and wandered almost at random, and sad as death.

He soon left the main road, and crossed a stile; it took him by the side of a babbling brook, and at the edge of a picturesque wood. Ever and anon he came to a water-wheel, and above the water-wheel a dam made originally by art, but now looking like a sweet little lake. They were beautiful places; the wheels and their attendant works were old and rugged, but picturesque and countrified; and the little lakes behind, fringed by the master-grinder's garden, were strangely peaceful and pretty. Here the vulgar labor of the grindstone was made beautiful and incredibly poetic.

"Ah!" thought poor Little, "how happy a workman must be that plies his trade here in the fresh air. And how unfortunate I am to be tied to a power-wheel, in that filthy town, instead of being here, where Nature turns the wheel, and the birds chirp at hand, and the scene and the air are all purity and peace."

One place of the kind was particularly charming. The dam was larger than most, and sloping grass on one side, cropped short by the grinder's sheep: on the other his strip of garden: and bushes and flowers hung over the edge and glassed themselves in the clear water. Below the wheel, and at one side, was the master-grinder's cottage, covered with creepers.

But Henry's mind was in no state to enjoy these beauties. He envied them; and, at last, they oppressed him, and he turned his back on them, and wandered, disconsolate, home.

He sat down on a stool by his mother, and laid his beating temples on her knees.

"What is it, my darling?" said she softly.

"Well, mother, for one thing, the Unions are against me, and I see I shall have to leave Hillsborough, soon or late."

"Never mind, dear; happiness does not depend upon the place we live in; and oh, Henry, whatever you do, never quarrel with those terrible grinders and people. The world is wide. Let us go back to London; the sooner the better. I have long seen there was something worrying you. But Saturday and Monday--they used to be your bright days."

"It will come to that, I suppose," said Henry, evading her last observation. "Yes," said he, wearily, "it will come to that." And he sighed so piteously that she forbore to press him. She had not the heart to cross-examine her suffering child.

That evening, mother and son sat silent by the fire: Henry had his own sad and bitter thoughts; and Mrs. Little was now brooding over the words Henry had spoken in the afternoon; and presently her maternal anxieties found a copious vent. She related to him, one after another, all the outrages that had been perpetrated in Hillsborough, while he was a child, and had been, each in its turn, the town talk.

It was a subject on which, if her son had been older, and more experienced in her sex, he would have closed her mouth promptly, she being a woman whose own nerves had received so frightful a shock by the manner of her husband's death. But, inadvertently, he let her run on, till she told him how a poor grinder had been carried home to his wife, blinded and scorched with gunpowder, and another had been taken home, all bleeding, to his mother, so beaten and bruised with life-preservers, that he had laid between life and death for nine days, and never uttered one word all that time, in reply to all her prayers and tears.

Now Mrs. Little began these horrible narratives with a forced and unnatural calmness; but, by the time she got to the last; she had worked herself up to a paroxysm of sympathy with other wretched women in Hillsborough, and trembled all over, like one in an ague, for herself: and at last stretched out her shaking hands, and screamed to him, "Oh, Harry, Harry, have pity on your miserable mother! Think what these eyes of mine have seen--bleeding at my feet--there--there--I see it now"--(her eyes dilated terribly at the word)--"oh, promise me, for pity's sake, that these--same--eyes--shall never see you brought and laid down bleeding like him!" With this she went into violent hysterics, and frightened her son more than all the ruffians in the town had ever frightened him.

She was a long time in this pitiable condition, and he nursed her: but at last her convulsion ceased, and her head rested on her son's shoulder in a pitiable languor.

Henry was always a good son: but he never loved his mother so tenderly as he did this night. His heart yearned over this poor panting soul, so stately in form, yet so weak, so womanly, and lovable; his playmate in childhood; his sweet preceptor in boyhood; the best friend and most unselfish lover he had, or could ever hope to have, on earth; dear to him by her long life of loving sacrifice, and sacred by that their great calamity, which had fallen so much heavier on her than on him.

He soothed her, he fondled her, he kneeled at her feet, and promised her most faithfully he would never be brought home to her bruised or bleeding. No; if the Unions rejected his offer he would go back to London with her at once.

And so, thrust from Hillsborough by the trades, and by his fears for Miss Carden, and also drawn from it by his mother's terrors, he felt himself a feather on the stream of Destiny; and left off struggling: beaten, heart-sick, and benumbed, he let the current carry him like any other dead thing that drifts.

He still plied the hammer, but in a dead-alive way.

He wrote a few cold lines to Mr. Jobson, to say that he thought it was time for a plain answer to be given to a business proposal. But, as he had no great hope the reply would be favorable, he awaited it in a state bordering on apathy. And so passed a miserable week.

And all this time she, for whose sake he denied himself the joy and consolation of her company, though his heart ached and pined for it, had hard thoughts of him, and vented them too to Jael Dence.

The young are so hasty in all their judgments.

While matters were in this condition, Henry found, one morning, two fresh panes of glass broken in his window.

In these hardware works the windows seldom or never open: air is procured in all the rooms by the primitive method of breaking a pane here and a pane there; and the general effect is as unsightly as a human mouth where teeth and holes alternate. The incident therefore was nothing, if it had occurred in any other room; but it was not a thing to pass over in this room, secured by a Bramah lock, the key of which was in Henry's pocket: the panes must have been broken from the outside. It occurred to him directly that a stone had been thrown in with another threatening scrawl.

But, casting his eye all round, he saw nothing of the kind about.

Then, for a moment, a graver suspicion crossed his mind: might not some detonating substance of a nature to explode when trodden upon, have been flung in? Hillsborough excelled in deviltries of this kind.

Henry thought of his mother, and would not treat the matter lightly or unsuspiciously. He stood still till he had lighted a lucifer match, and examined the floor of his room. Nothing.

He lighted a candle, and examined all the premises. Nothing.

But, when he brought his candle to the window, he made a discovery: the window had two vertical iron uprights, about three-quarters of an inch in circumference: and one of these revealed to his quick eye a bright horizontal line. It had been sawed with a fine saw.

Apparently an attempt had been made to enter his room from outside.

The next question was, had that attempt succeeded.

He tried the bar; it was not quite cut through.

He locked the forge up directly, and went to his handling room. There he remained till Mr. Cheetham entered the works; then he went to him, and begged him to visit his forge.

Mr. Cheetham came directly, and examined the place carefully.

He negatived, at once, the notion that any Hillsborough hand had been unable to saw through a bar of that moderate thickness. "No," said he, "they were disturbed, or else some other idea struck them all of a sudden; or else they hadn't given themselves time, and are coming again to-morrow. I hope they are. By six o'clock to-night, I'll have a common wooden shutter hung with six good hinges on each side, easy to open at the center; only, across the center, I'll fix a Waterloo cracker inside."

"A Waterloo cracker!"

"Ay, but such a one as you never saw. I shall make it myself. It shall be only four inches long, but as broad as my hand, and enough detonating powder in it to blow the shutter fifty feet into the air: and if there should be one of Jobson's lads behind the shutter at the time, why he'll learn flying, and naught to pay for wings."

"Why, sir, you are planning the man's death!"

"And what is he planning? Light your forge, and leave the job to me. I'm Hillsborough too, and they've put my blood up at last."

While Henry lighted his forge, Mr. Cheetham whipped out a rule, and measured the window exactly. This done, he went down the stairs, and crossed the yard to go to his office.

But, before he could enter it, a horrible thing occurred in the room he had just left; so horrible, it made him, brave as he was, turn and scream like a woman.

Some miscreant, by a simple but ingenious means, which afterward transpired, had mixed a quantity of gunpowder with the smithy-slack or fine cinders of Henry's forge. The moment the forge was hot, the powder ignited with a tremendous thud, a huge mass of flame rushed out, driving the coals with it, like shot from a gun; Henry, scorched, blackened, and blinded, was swept, as by a flaming wind, against the opposite wall; then, yelling, and stark mad with fright (for nothing drives men out of their wits like an explosion in a narrow space), he sprang at the window, head foremost, and with such velocity that the sawed iron snapped like a stick of barley-sugar, and out he went head foremost; and this it was made Cheetham scream, to see him head downward, and the paving-stones below.

But the aperture was narrow: his body flew through, but his tight arm went round the unbroken upright, and caught it in the bend of the elbow.

Then Cheetham roared, "Hold on, Little! Hold on, I tell you!"

The scared brain of a man accustomed to obey received the command almost without the mind; and the grinders and forgers, running wildly into the yard, saw the obnoxious workman, black as a cinder from head to foot, bleeding at the face from broken glass, hanging up there by one hand, moaning with terror, and looking down with dilating eye, while thick white smoke rushed curling out, as if his body was burning. Death by suffocation was at his back, and broken bones awaited him below.

At sight of this human cinder, hanging by one hand between two deaths, every sentiment but humanity vanished from the ruggedest bosom, and the skilled workmen set themselves to save their unpopular comrade with admirable quickness and judgment: two new wheel-bands, that had just come into the works, were caught up in a moment, and four workmen ran with them and got below the suspended figure: they then turned back to back, and, getting the bands over their shoulders, pulled hard against each other. This was necessary to straighten the bands: they weighed half a hundred weight each. Others stood at the center of the bands, and directed Little where to drop, and stood ready to catch him should he bound off them.

But now matters took an unexpected turn. Little, to all appearance, was blind and deaf. He hung there, moaning, and glaring, and his one sinewy arm supported his muscular but light frame almost incredibly. He was out of his senses, or nearly.

"Let thyself come, lad," cried a workman, "we are all right to catch thee."

He made no answer, but hung there glaring and moaning.

"The man will drop noane, till he swouns," said another, watching him keenly.

"Then get you closer to the wall, men," cried Cheetham, in great anxiety. "He'll come like a stone, when he does come." This injunction was given none too soon; the men had hardly shifted their positions, when Little's hand opened, and he came down like lead, with his hands all abroad, and his body straight; but his knees were slightly bent, and he caught the bands just below the knee, and bounded off them into the air, like a cricket-ball. But many hands grabbed at him, and the grinder Reynolds caught him by the shoulder, and they rolled on the ground together, very little the worse for that tumble. "Well done! well done!" cried Cheetham. "Let him lie, lads, he is best there for a while; and run for a doctor, one of you."

"Ay, run for Jack Doubleface," cried several voices at once.

"Now, make a circle, and give him air, men." Then they all stood in a circle, and eyed the blackened and quivering figure with pity and sympathy, while the canopy of white smoke bellied overhead. Nor were those humane sentiments silent; and the rough seemed to be even more overcome than the others: no brains were required to pity this poor fellow now; and so strong an appeal to their hearts, through their senses, roused their good impulses and rare sensibilities. Oh, it was strange to hear good and kindly sentiments come out in the Dash dialect.

"It's a ---- shame!"

"There lies a good workman done for by some ---- thief, that wasn't fit to blow his bellows, ---- him!"

"Say he was a cockney, he was always ---- civil."

"And life's as sweet to him as to any man in Hillsborough."

"Hold your ---- tongue, he's coming to."

Henry did recover his wits enough to speak; and what do you think was his first word?

He clasped his hands together, and said,--"MY MOTHER! OH, DON'T LET HER KNOW!"

This simple cry went through many a rough heart; a loud gulp or two were heard soon after, and more than one hard and coaly cheek was channeled by sudden tears. But now a burly figure came rolling in; they drew back and silenced each other.--"The Doctor!" This was the remarkable person they called Jack Doubleface. Nature had stuck a philosophic head, with finely-cut features, and a mouth brimful of finesse, on to a corpulent and ungraceful body, that yawed from side to side as he walked.

The man of art opened with two words. He looked up at the white cloud, which was now floating away; sniffed the air, and said, "Gunpowder!" Then he looked down at Little, and said, "Ah!" half dryly, half sadly. Indeed several sentences of meaning condensed themselves into that simple interjection. At this moment, some men, whom curiosity had drawn to Henry's forge, came back to say the forge had been blown up, and "the bellows torn limb from jacket, and the room strewed with ashes."

The doctor laid a podgy hand on the prisoner's wrist: the touch was light, though the fingers were thick and heavy. The pulse, which had been very low, was now galloping and bounding frightfully. "Fetch him a glass of brandy-and-water," said Dr. Amboyne. (There were still doctors in Hillsborough, though not in London, who would have had him bled on the spot.)

"Now, then, a surgeon! Which of you lads operates on the eye, in these works?"

A lanky file-cutter took a step forward. "I am the one that takes the motes out of their eyes."

"Then be good enough to show me his eye."

The file-cutter put out a hand with fingers prodigiously long and thin, and deftly parted both Little's eyelids with his finger and thumb, so as to show the whole eye.

"Hum!" said the doctor, and shook his head.

He then patted the sufferer all over, and the result of that examination was satisfactory. Then came the brandy-and-water; and while Henry's teeth were clattering at the glass and he was trying to sip the liquid, Dr. Amboyne suddenly lifted his head, and took a keen survey of the countenances round him. He saw the general expression of pity on the rugged faces. He also observed one rough fellow who wore a strange wild look: the man seemed puzzled, scared, confused like one half awakened from some hideous dream. This was the grinder who had come into the works in place of the hand Cheetham had discharged for refusing to grind cockney blades.

"Hum!" said Dr. Amboyne, and appeared to be going into a brown study.

But he shook that off, and said briskly, "Now, then, what was his crime? Did he owe some mutual aid society six-and-four-pence?"

"That's right," said Reynolds, sullenly, "throw every thing on the Union. If we knew who it was, he'd lie by the side of this one in less than a minute, and, happen, not get up again so soon." A growl of assent confirmed the speaker's words. Cheetham interposed and drew Amboyne aside, and began to tell him who the man was and what the dispute; but Amboyne cut the latter explanation short. "What," said he, "is this the carver whose work I saw up at Mr. Carden's?"

"This is the very man, no doubt."

"Why, he's a sculptor: Praxiteles in wood. A fine choice they have made for their gunpowder, a workman that did honor to the town."

A faint flush of gratified pride colored the ghastly cheek a moment.

"Doctor, shall I live to finish the bust?" said Henry, piteously.

"That and hundreds more, if you obey me. The fact is, Mr. Cheetham, this young man is not hurt, but his nerves have received a severe shock; and the sooner he is out of this place the better. Ah, there is my brougham at the gate. Come, put him into it, and I'll take him to the infirmary."

"No," said Little, "I won't go there; my mother would hear of it."

"Oh, then your mother is not to know?"

"Not for all the world! She has had trouble enough. I'll just wash my face and buy a clean shirt, and she'll never know what has happened. It would kill her. Oh, yes, it would kill her!"

The doctor eyed him with warm approval. "You are a fine young fellow. I'll see you safe through this, and help you throw dust in your mother's eyes. If you go to her with that scratched face, we are lost. Come, get into my carriage, and home with me."

"Mayn't I wash my face first? And look at my shirt: as black as a cinder."

"Wash your face, by all means: but you can button your coat over your shirt."

The coat was soon brought, and so was a pail of water and a piece of yellow soap. Little dashed his head and face into the bucket, and soon inked all the water. The explosion had filled his hair with black dust, and grimed his face and neck like a sweep's. This ablution made him clean, but did not bring back his ruddy color. He looked pale and scratched.

The men helped him officiously into the carriage, though he could have walked very well alone.

Henry asked leave to buy a clean shirt. The doctor said he would lend him one at home.

While Henry was putting it on Dr. Amboyne ordered his dog-cart instead of his brougham, and mixed some medicines. And soon Henry found himself seated in the dog-cart, with a warm cloak over him, and whisking over the stones of Hillsborough.

All this had been done so rapidly and unhesitatingly that Henry, injured and shaken as he was, had yielded passive obedience. But now he began to demur a little. "But where are we going, sir?" he asked.

"To change the air and the scene. I'll be frank with you--you are man enough to bear the truth--you have received a shock that will very likely bring on brain-fever, unless you get some sleep tonight. But you would not sleep in Hillsborough. You'd wake a dozen times in the night, trembling like an aspen leaf, and fancying you were blown up again."

"Yes, but my mother, sir! If I don't go home at seven o'clock, she'll find me out."

"If you went crazy wouldn't she find you out? Come, my young friend, trust to my experience, and to the interest this attempt to murder you, and your narrow escape, have inspired in me. When I have landed you in the Temple of Health, and just wasted a little advice on a pig-headed patient in the neighborhood (he is the squire of the place), I'll drive back to Hillsborough, and tell your mother some story or other: you and I will concoct that together as we go."

At this Henry was all obedience, and indeed thanked him, with the tears in his eyes, for his kindness to a poor stranger.

Dr. Amboyne smiled. "If you were not a stranger, you would know that saving cutlers' lives is my hobby, and one in which I am steadily resisted and defeated, especially by the cutlers themselves: why, I look upon you as a most considerate and obliging young man for indulging me in this way. If you had been a Hillsborough hand, you would insist upon a brain-fever, and a trip to the lunatic asylum, just to vex me, and hinder me of my hobby."

Henry stared. This was too eccentric for him to take it all in at once. "What!" said Dr. Amboyne, observing his amazement, "Did you never hear of Dr. Doubleface?"

"No, sir."

"Never hear of the corpulent lunatic, who goes about the city chanting, like a cuckoo, 'Put yourself in his place--put yourself in her place--in their place?'

"No, sir, I never did."

"Then such is fame. Well, never mind that just now; there's a time for every thing. Please observe that ruined house: the ancient family to whom it belongs are a remarkable example of the vicissitude of human affairs." He then told him the curious ups and downs of that family, which, at two distant periods, had held vast possessions in the county; but were now represented by the shell of one manor house, and its dovecote, the size of a modern villa. Next he showed him an obscure battlefield, and told him that story, and who were the parties engaged; and so on. Every mile furnished its legend, and Dr. Amboyne related them all so graphically that the patient's mind was literally stolen away from himself. At last, after a rapid drive of eleven miles through the pure invigorating air, they made a sudden turn, and entered a pleasant and singularly rural village: they drew up at a rustic farmhouse, clad with ivy; and Dr. Amboyne said, "This is the temple: here you can sleep as safe from gunpowder as a field-marshal born."

The farmer's daughter came out, and beamed pleasure at sight of the doctor: he got down, and told her the case, privately, and gave her precise instructions. She often interrupted the narrative with "Lawkadaisies," and other rural interjections, and simple exclamations of pity. She promised faithful compliance with his orders.

He then beckoned Henry in, and said, "This picture of health was a patient of mine once, as you are now; there's encouragement for you. I put you under her charge. Get a letter written to your mother, and I'll come back for it in half an hour. You had a headache, and were feverish, so you consulted a doctor. He advised immediate rest and change of air, and he drove you at once to this village. Write you that, and leave the rest to me. We doctors are dissembling dogs. We have still something to learn in curing diseases; but at making light of them to the dying, and other branches of amiable mendacity, we are masters."

As soon as he was gone, the comely young hostess began on her patient. "Dear heart, sir, was it really you as was blowed up with gunpowder?"

"Indeed it was, and not many hours ago. It seems like a dream."

"Well, now, who'd think that, to look at you? Why, you are none the worse for, by a scratch or two, and dear heart, I've seen a young chap bring as bad home, from courting, in these parts; and wed the lass as marked him--within the year."

"Oh, it is not the scratches; but feel my hand, how it trembles. And it used to be as firm as a rock; for I never drink."

"So it do, I declare. Why, you do tremble all over; and no wonder, poor soul. Come you in this minut, and sit down a bit by the fire, while I go and make the room ready for you."

But, as soon as he was seated by the fire, the current began to flow again. "Well, I never liked Hillsborough folk much--poor, mean-visaged tykes they be--but now I do hate 'em. What, blow up a decent young man like you, and a well-favored, and hair like jet, and eyes in your head like sloes! But that's their ground of spite, I warrant me; the nasty, ugly, dirty dogs. Well, you may just snap your fingers at 'em all now. They don't come out so far as this; and, if they did, stouter men grows in this village than any in Hillsborough: and I've only to hold up my finger, for as little as I be, and they'd all be well ducked in father's horsepond, and then flogged home again with a good cart-whip well laid on. And, another thing, whatever we do, Squire, he will make it good in law: he is gentle, and we are simple; but our folk and his has stood by each other this hundred year and more. But, la, I run on so, and you was to write a letter again the doctor came back. I'll fetch you some paper this minut."

She brought him writing materials, and stood by him with this apology, "If 'twas to your sweetheart I'd be off. But 'tis to your mother." (With a side glance), "She have been a handsome woman in her day, I'll go bail."

"She is as beautiful as ever in my eyes," said Henry, tenderly. "And, oh, heaven! give me the sense to write to her without frightening her."

"Then I won't hinder you no more with my chat," said his hostess, with kindly good humor, and slipped away upstairs. She lighted a great wood fire in the bedroom, and laid the bed and the blankets all round it, and opened the window, and took the homespun linen sheets out of a press, and made the room very tidy. Then she went down again, and the moment Henry saw her, he said "I feel your kindness, miss, but I don't know your name, nor where in the world I am." His hostess smiled. "That is no secret. I'm Martha Dence--at your service: and this is Cairnhope town."

"Cairnhope!" cried Henry, and started back, so that his wooden chair made a loud creak upon the stones of the farmer's kitchen.

Martha Dence stared, but said nothing; for almost at that moment the doctor returned, all in a hurry, for the letter.

Henry begged him to look at it, and see if it would do.

The doctor read it. "Hum!" said he, "it is a very pretty, filial letter, and increases my interest in you; give me your hand: there. Well, it won't do: too shaky. If your mother once sees this, I may talk till doomsday, she'll not believe a word. You must put off writing till to-morrow night. Now give me her address, for I really must get home."

"She lives on the second floor, No. 13 Chettle Street."

"Her name?"

"Sir, if you ask for the lady that lodges on the second floor, you will be sure to see her."

Dr. Amboyne looked a little surprised, and not very well pleased, at what seemed a want of confidence. But he was a man singularly cautious and candid in forming his judgments; so he forbore all comment, and delivered his final instructions. "Here is a bottle containing only a few drops of faba Ignatii in water, it is an innocent medicine, and has sometimes a magical effect in soothing the mind and nerves. A table-spoonful three times a day. And this is a sedative, which you can take if you find yourself quite unable to sleep. But I wouldn't have recourse to it unnecessarily; for these sedatives are uncertain in their operation; and, when a man is turned upside down, as you have been, they sometimes excite. Have a faint light in your bedroom. Tie a cord to the bell-rope, and hold it in your hand all night. Fix your mind on that cord, and keep thinking, 'This is to remind me that I am eleven miles from Hillsborough, in a peaceful village, safe from all harm.' To-morrow, walk up to the top of Cairnhope Peak, and inhale the glorious breeze, and look over four counties. Write to your mother at night, and, meantime, I'll do my best to relieve her anxiety. Good-bye."

Memory sometimes acts like an old flint-gun: it hangs fire, yet ends by going off. While Dr. Amboyne was driving home, the swarthy, but handsome, features of the workman he had befriended seemed to enter his mind more deeply than during the hurry, and be said to himself, "Jet black hair; great black eyes; and olive skin; they are rare in these parts; and, somehow, they remind me a little of her."

Then his mind went back, in a moment, over many years, to the days when he was stalwart, but not unwieldy, and loved a dark but peerless beauty, loved her deeply, and told his love, and was esteemed and pitied, but another was beloved.

And so sad, yet absorbing, was the retrospect of his love, his sorrow, and her own unhappy lot, that it blotted out of his mind, for a time, the very youth whose features and complexion had launched him into the past.

But the moment his horse's feet rang on the stones, this burly philosopher shook off the past, and set himself to recover lost time. He drove rapidly to several patients, and, at six o'clock, was at 13 Chettle Street, and asked for the lady on the second floor, "Yes, sir: she is at home," was the reply. "But I don't know; she lives very retired. She hasn't received any visits since they came. However, they rent the whole floor, and the sitting-room fronts you."

Dr. Amboyne mounted the stair and knocked at the door. A soft and mellow voice bade him enter. He went in, and a tall lady in black, with plain linen collar and wristbands, rose to receive him. They confronted each other. Time and trouble had left their trace, but there were the glorious eyes, and jet black hair, and the face, worn and pensive, but still beautiful. It was the woman he had loved, the only one.

"Mrs. Little!" said he, in an indescribable tone.

"Dr. Amboyne!"

For a few moments he forgot the task he had undertaken; and could only express his astonishment and pleasure at seeing her once more.

Then he remembered why he was there; and the office he had undertaken so lightly alarmed him now.

His first instinct was to gain time. Accordingly, he began to chide her gently for having resided in the town and concealed it from him; then, seeing her confused and uncomfortable at that reproach, and in the mood to be relieved by any change of topic, he glided off, with no little address, as follows:--"Observe the consequences: here have I been most despotically rusticating a youth who turns out to be your son."

"My son! is there any thing the matter with my son? Oh, Dr. Amboyne!"

"He must have been out of sorts, you know, or he would not have consulted me," replied the doctor, affecting candor.

"Consult! Why, what has happened? He was quite well when he left me this morning."

"I doubt that. He complained of headache and fever. But I soon found his mind was worried. A misunderstanding with the trades! I was very much pleased with his face and manner; my carriage was at the door; his pulse was high, but there was nothing that country air and quiet will not restore. So I just drove him away, and landed him in a farm-house."

Mrs. Little's brow flushed at this. She was angry. But, in a nature so gentle as hers, anger soon gave way. She turned a glance of tearful and eloquent reproach on Dr. Amboyne. "The first time we have ever been separated since he was born," said she, with a sigh.

Dr. Amboyne's preconceived plan broke down that moment. He said, hurriedly,

"Take my carriage, and drive to him. Better do that than torment yourself."

"Where is he?" asked the widow, brightening up at the proposal.

"At Cairnhope."

At this word, Mrs. Little's face betrayed a series of emotions: first confusion, then astonishment, and at last a sort of superstitious alarm. "At Cairnhope?" she faltered at last, "My son at Cairnhope?"

"Pray do not torment yourself with fancies," said the doctor. "All this is the merest accident--the simplest thing in the world. I cured Patty Dence of diphtheria, when it decimated the village. She and her family are grateful; the air of Cairnhope has a magic effect on people who live in smoke, and Martha and Jael let me send them out an invalid now and then to be reinvigorated. I took this young man there, not knowing who he was. Go to him, if you like. But, frankly, as his physician, I would rather you did not. Never do a wise thing by halves. He ought to be entirely separated from all his cares, even from yourself (who are doubtless one of them), for five or six days. He needs no other medicine but that and the fine air of Cairnhope."

"Then somebody must see him every day, and tell me. Oh! Dr. Amboyne, this is the beginning: what will the end be? I am miserable."

"My man shall ride there every day, and see him, and bring you back a letter from him."

"Your man!" said Mrs. Little, a little haughtily.

Dr. Amboyne met her glance. "If there was any ground for alarm, should I not go myself every day?" said he, gravely, and even tenderly.

"Forgive me," said the widow, and gave him her hand with a sweet and womanly gesture.

The main difficulty was now got over; and Dr. Amboyne was careful not to say too much, for he knew that his tongue moved among pitfalls.

As Dr. Amboyne descended the stairs, the landlady held a door ajar, and peeped at him, according to a custom of such delicate-minded females as can neither restrain their curiosity nor indulge it openly. Dr. Amboyne beckoned to her, and asked for a private interview. This was promptly accorded.

"Would ten guineas be of any service to you, madam?"

"Eh, dear, that it would, sir. Why, my rent is just coming due."

Under these circumstances, the bargain was soon struck. Not a syllable about the explosion at Cheetham's was to reach the second floor lodger's ears, and no Hillsborough journal was to mount the stairs until the young man's return. If inquired for, they were to be reported all sold out, and a London journal purchased instead.

Having secured a keen and watchful ally in this good woman, who, to do her justice, showed a hearty determination to earn her ten guineas, Dr. Amboyne returned home, his own philosophic pulse beating faster than it had done for some years.

He had left Mrs. Little grateful, and, apparently, in good spirits; but, ere he had been gone an hour, the bare separation from her son overpowered her, and a host of vague misgivings tortured her, and she slept but little that night. By noon next day she was thoroughly miserable; but Dr. Amboyne's man rode up to the door in the afternoon with a cheerful line from Henry.

"All right, dear mother. Better already. Letter by post.

"Henry."

She detained the man, and made up a packet of things for Cairnhope, and gave him five shillings to be sure and take them.

This was followed by a correspondence, a portion of which will suffice to eke out the narrative.

"DEAREST MOTHER,--I slept ill last night, and got up aching from head to foot, as if I had been well hided. But they sent me to the top of Cairnhope Peak, and, what with the keen air and the glorious view, I came home and ate like a hog. That pleased Martha Dence, and she kept putting me slices off her own plate, till I had to cry quarter. As soon as I have addressed this letter, I'm off to bed, for it is all I can do not to fall asleep sitting.

"I am safe to be all right to-morrow, so pray don't fret. I am, dear mother," etc., etc.

"DEAREST MOTHER,--I hope you are not fretting about me. Dr. Amboyne promised to stop all that. But do write, and say you are not fretting and fancying all manner of things at my cutting away so suddenly. It was the doctor's doing. And, mother, I shall not stay long away from you, for I slept twelve hours at a stretch last night, and now I'm another man. But really, I think the air of that Cairnhope Peak would cure a fellow at his last gasp.

"Thank you for the linen, and the brushes, and things. But you are not the sort to forget anything a fellow might want," etc.

"No, my darling son. Be in no hurry to leave Cairnhope. Of course, love, I was alarmed at first; for I know doctors make the best of every thing; and then the first parting!--that is always a sorrowful thing. But, now you are there, I beg you will stay till you are quite recovered. Your letters are a delight, and one I could not have, and you as well, you know.

"Since you are at Cairnhope--how strange that seems--pray go and see the old church, where your forefathers are buried. There are curious inscriptions, and some brasses nobody could decipher when I was a girl; but perhaps you might, you are so clever. Your grandfather's monument is in the chancel: I want you to see it. Am I getting very old, that my heart turns back to these scenes of my youth?

"P.S.--Who is this Martha Dence?"

"DEAR MOTHER,--Martha Dence is the farmer's daughter I lodge with. She is not so pretty as her sister Jael that is with Miss Carden; but she is a comely girl, and as good as gold, and bespoke by the butcher. And her putting slices from her plate to mine is a village custom, I find.

"Mother, the people here are wonderfully good and simple. First of all, there's farmer Dence, with his high bald head, like a patriarch of old; and he sits and beams with benevolence, but does not talk much. But he lets me see I can stay with him six years, if I choose. Then, there's Martha, hospitality itself, and ready to fly at my enemies like a mastiff. She is a little hot in the temper, feathers up in a moment; but, at a soft word, they go down again as quick. Then, there's the village blacksmith. I call him 'The gentle giant.' He is a tremendous fellow in height, and size, and sinew; but such a kind, sweet-tempered chap. He could knock down an ox, yet he wouldn't harm a fly. I am his idol: I sauntered in to his smithy, and forged him one or two knives; and of course he had never seen the hammer used with that nicety; but instead of hating me, as the bad forgers in Hillsborough do, he regularly worships me, and comes blushing up to the farm-house after hours, to ask after me and get a word with me. He is the best whistler in the parish, and sometimes we march down the village at night, arm-in-arm, whistling a duet. This charms the natives so that we could take the whole village out at our heels, and put them down in another parish. But the droll thing is, they will not take me for what I am. My gentle giant would say 'Sir' till I pretended to be affronted; the women and girls will bob me courtesies, and the men and white headed boys will take off their hats and pull their front hair to me. If a skilled workman wants to burst with vanity, let him settle in Cairnhope."

"Martha Dence and I have had words, and what do you think it was about? I happened to let out my opinion of Mr. Raby. Mother, it was like setting a match to a barrel of gunpowder. She turned as red as fire, and said, 'Who be you that speaks against Raby to Dence?'

"I tried to pacify her, but it was no use. 'Don't speak to me,' said she. 'I thought better of you. You and I are out.' I bowed before the storm, and, to give her time to cool, I obeyed your wishes, and walked to Cairnhope old church. What a curious place! But I could not get in; and, on my return, I found Mr. Raby keeps the key. Now, you can't do a thing here, or say a word, but what it is known all over the village. So Martha Dence meets me at the door, and says, very stiffly, she thought I might have told her I wanted to see the old church. I pulled a long, penitent face, and said, 'Yes; but unfortunately, I was out of her good books, and had orders not to speak to her.' 'Nay,' says she, 'life is too short for long quarrels. You are a stranger, and knew no better.' Then she told me to wait five minutes while she put on her bonnet, as she calls it. Well, I waited the five-and-forty minutes, and she put on her bonnet, and so many other smart things, that we couldn't possibly walk straight up to the old church. We had to go round by the butcher's shop, and order half a pound of suet; no less. 'And bring it yourself, this evening,' said I, 'or it might get lost on the road.' Says the butcher, 'Well, sir, that is the first piece of friendly advice any good Christian has bestowed--' But I heard no more, owing to Martha chasing me out of the shop.

"To reach the old church we had to pass the old ruffian's door. Martha went in; I sauntered on, and she soon came after me, with the key in her hand. 'But,' said she, 'he told me if my name hadn't been Dence he wouldn't trust me with it, though I went on my bended knees.'

"We opened the church-door, and I spent an hour inside, examining and copying inscriptions for you. But, when I came to take up a loose brass, to try and decipher it, Martha came screaming at me, 'Oh, put it down! put it down! I pledged my word to Squire you should not touch them brasses.' What could I do, mother? The poor girl was in an agony. This old ruffian has, somehow, bewitched her, and her father too, into a sort of superstitious devotion that I can't help respecting, unreasonable as it is. So I dropped the brass, and took to reflecting. And I give you my thoughts.

"What a pity and a shame that a building of this size should lie idle! If it was mine I would carefully remove all the monuments, and the dead bones, et cetera, to the new church, and turn this old building into a factory, or a set of granaries, or something useful. It is as great a sin to waste bricks and mortar as it is bread," etc.

"MY DEAR HARRY,--Your dear sprightly letters delight me, and reconcile me to the separation; for I see that your health is improving every day, by your gayety; and this makes me happy, though I can not quite be gay.

"Your last letter was very amusing, yet, somehow, it set me thinking, long and sadly; and some gentle remarks from Dr. Amboyne (he called yesterday) have also turned my mind the same way. Time has softened the terrible blow that estranged my brother and myself, and I begin to ask myself, was my own conduct perfect? was my brother's quite without excuse? I may have seen but one side, and been too hasty in judging him. At all events, I would have you, who are a man, think for yourself, and not rush into too harsh a view of that unhappy quarrel. Dearest, family quarrels are family misfortunes: why should they go down to another generation? You frighten me, when you wonder that Nathan and his family (I had forgotten his name was Dence) are attached to Mr. Raby. Why, with all his faults, my brother is a chivalrous, high-minded gentleman; his word is his bond, and he never deserts a friend, however humble; and I have heard our dear father say that, for many generations, uncommon acts of kindness had passed between that family of yeomen and the knights and squires of Raby.

"And now, dear, I am going to be very foolish. But, if these Dences are as great favorites with him as they were with my father, she could easily get you into the house some day, when he is out hunting; and I do want you to see one thing more before you come back from Cairnhope--your mother's picture. It hangs, or used to hang, in the great dining-room, nearly opposite the fire-place.

"I blush at my childishness, but I should like my child to see what his mother was when she brought him into the world, that sad world in which he has been her only joy and consolation.

P. S.--What an idea! Turn that dear old church into a factory! But you are a young man of the day. And a wonderful day it is; I can not quite keep up with it."

"DEAR MOTHER,--I have been there. Mr. Raby is a borough magistrate, as well as a county justice; and was in Hillsborough all day to-day. Martha Dence took me to Raby Hall, and her name was a passport. When I got to the door, I felt as if something pulled me, and said, 'It's an enemy's house; don't go in.' I wish I had obeyed the warning; but I did not.

"Well, I have seen your portrait. It is lovely, it surpasses any woman I ever saw. And it must have been your image, for it is very like you now, only in the bloom of your youth.

"And now, dear mother, having done something for you, quite against my own judgment, and my feelings too, please do something for me. Promise me never to mention Mr. Raby's name to me again, by letter, or by word of mouth either. He is not a gentleman: he is not a man; he is a mean, spiteful, cowardly cur. I'll keep out of his way, if I can; but if he gets in mine, I shall give him a devilish good hiding, then and there, and I'll tell him the reason why; and I will not tell you.

"Dear mother, I did intend to stay till Saturday, but, after this, I shall come back to you to-morrow. My own sweet dove of a mammy; who but a beast could hurt or affront you?

"So no more letters from your dutiful and affectionate son,

"Harry."

Next day young Little took leave of his friends in Cairnhope, with a promise to come over some Sunday, and see them all. He borrowed a hooked stick of his devotee, the blacksmith, and walked off with his little bundle over his shoulder, in high health and spirits, and ripe for any thing.

Some successful men are so stout-hearted, their minds seem never to flinch. Others are elastic; they give way, and appear crushed; but, let the immediate pressure be removed, they fly back again, and their enemy finds he has not gained an inch. Henry's was of this sort; and, as he swung along through the clear brisk air, the world seemed his football once more.

This same morning Jael Dence was to go to Cairnhope, at her own request.

She packed her box, and corded it, and brought it down herself, and put it in the passage, and the carrier was to call for it at one. As for herself, four miles of omnibus, and the other seven on foot, was child's play to her, whose body was as lusty and active as her heart was tender and clinging.

She came in to the drawing-room, with her bonnet and shawl on, and the tear in her eye, to bid Miss Carden good-bye. Two male friends would have parted in five minutes; but this pair were a wonderful time separating, and still there was always something to say, that kept Grace detaining, or Jael lingering; and, when she had been going, going, going, for more than half an hour, all of a sudden she cried, out, "Oh! There he is!" and flushed all over.

"Who?" asked Grace, eagerly.

"The dark young man. He is at the door now, miss. And me going away," she faltered.

"Well then, why go till he has paid his visit? Sit down. You needn't take off your bonnet."

Miss Carden then settled herself, took up her work, and prepared to receive her preceptor as he deserved, an intention she conveyed to Jael by a glance, just as Henry entered blooming with exercise and the keen air, and looking extremely handsome and happy.

His reception was a chilling bow from Miss Carden, and from Jael a cheek blushing with pleasure at the bare sight of him, but an earnest look of mild reproach. It seemed cruel of him to stay away so long, and then come just as she was going.

This reception surprised Henry, and disappointed him; however he constrained himself, and said politely, but rather coldly, that some unpleasant circumstances had kept him away; but he hoped now to keep his time better.

"Oh, pray consult your own convenience entirely," said Miss Carden. "Come when you have nothing better to do; that is the understanding."

"I should be always coming, at that rate."

Grace took no notice. "Would you like to see how I look with my one eyebrow?" said she. "Jael, please fetch it."

While Jael was gone for the bust, Henry took a humbler tone, and in a low voice began to excuse his absence; and I think he would have told the real truth, if he had been encouraged a little; but he was met with a cold and withering assurance that it was a matter of no consequence. Henry thought this unfair, and, knowing in his own heart it was ungrateful, he rebelled. He bit his lip, sat down as gloomy as the grave, and resumed his work, silent and sullen.

As for Jael, she brought in the bust, and then sat down with her bonnet on, quaking; for she felt sure that, in such a dismal dearth of conversation, Miss Carden would be certain to turn round very soon, and say, "Well, Jael, you can go now."

But this Quaker's meeting was interrupted by a doctor looking in to prescribe for Miss Carden's cold. The said cold was imperceptible to vulgar eyes, but Grace had detected it, and had written to her friend, Dr. Amboyne, to come and make it as imperceptible to herself as to the spectator.

In rolled the doctor, and was not a little startled at sight of Little.

"Hallo!" cried be. "What, cured already? Cairnhope forever!" He then proceeded to feel his pulse instead of Miss Carden's, and inspect his eye, at which Grace Carden stared.

"What, is he unwell?"

"Why, a man does not get blown up with gunpowder without some little disturbance of the system."

"Blown up with gunpowder! What do you mean?"

"What, have you not heard about it? Don't you read the newspapers?"

"No; never."

"Merciful powers! But has he not told you?"

"No; he tells us nothing."

"Then I'll tell you, it is of no use your making faces at me. There is no earthly reason why she should be kept in the dark. These Hillsborough trades want to drive this young man out of town: why--is too long and intricate for you to follow. He resists this tyranny, gently, but firmly."

"I'd resist it furiously," said Grace.

"The consequence is, they wrote him several threatening letters; and, at last, some caitiff put gunpowder into his forge; it exploded, and blew him out of a second-floor window."

"Oh! oh!" screamed Grace Carden and Jael; and by one womanly impulse they both put their hands before their faces, as if to shut out the horrible picture.

"What is that for?" said the doctor. "You see he is all right now. But, I promise you, he cut a very different figure when I saw him directly afterward; he was scorched as black as a coal----"

"Oh, doctor, don't; pray don't. Oh, sir, why did you not tell me?"

"And his face bleeding," continued the merciless doctor.

"Oh dear! oh dear!" And the sweet eyes were turned, all swimming in water upon Henry, with a look of angelic pity.

"His nerves were terribly shaken, but there were no bones broken. I said to myself, 'He must sleep or go mad, and he will not sleep in the town that has blown him up.' I just drove the patient off to peace and pure air, and confided him to one of the best creatures in England--Martha Dence."

Jael uttered an exclamation of wonder, which drew attention to her and her glowing cheeks.

"Oh yes, Miss Jael," said Henry, "I was going to tell you. I have been a fortnight with your people, and, if I live a hundred years, I shall not forget their goodness to me. God bless them."

"'Twas the least they could do," said Jael, softly.

"What a pity you are going out. I should have liked to talk to you about your father, and Martha, and George the blacksmith. Doctor, who would live in a town after Cairnhope?"

Jael's fingers trembled at her bonnet-strings, and, turning a look of piteous supplication on Grace, she faltered out, "If you please, miss, might I stay over to-day?"

"Of course. And then he will tell you all about your people, and that will do just as well as you going to see them; and better."

Off came Jael's bonnet with wonderful celerity.

"Get the whole story out of him," said Dr. Amboyne. "It is well worth your attention. As for me, I must go as soon as I have prescribed for you. What is the matter?"

"The matter is that there's nothing the matter; prescribe for that. And that I'm a goose--prescribe for that--and don't read the newspapers; prescribe for that."

"Well, then, I prescribe the Hillsborough Liberal. It has drawn a strong picture of this outrage, and shown its teeth to the Trades. And, if I might advise a lady of your age and experience, I would say, in future always read the newspapers. They are, compared with books, what machinery is compared with hand-labor. But, in this one instance, go to the fountain-head, and ask Mr. Henry Little there, to tell you his own tragedy, with all the ins and outs."

"Ah! if he would," said Grace, turning her eyes on Henry. "But he is not so communicative to poor us. Is he, Jael?"

"No, miss."

"He never even told us his name. Did he, Jael?"

"No, miss. He is very close."

"Open him then," said the doctor. "Come, come, there are a pair of you; and evidently disposed to act in concert; if you can not turn a man inside out, I disown you; you are a discredit to your sex." He then shook hands with all three of them, and rolled away.

"Jael," said Miss Carden, "oblige me by ringing the bell."

A servant entered.

"Not at home to any human creature," said the young lady.

The servant retired.

"And, if they see me at the window, all the worse--for them. Now, Mr. Little?"

Henry complied, and told the whole story, with the exception of the threat to his sweetheart; and passed two delightful hours. Who is so devoid of egotism as not to like to tell his own adventures to sympathizing beauty? He told it in detail, and even read them portions of the threatening letters; and, as he told it, their lovely eyes seemed on fire; and they were red, and pale, by turns. He told it, like a man, with dignity, and sobriety, and never used an epithet. It was Miss Carden who supplied the "Monsters!" "Villains!" "Cowards!" "Wretches!" at due intervals. And once she started from her seat, and said she could not bear it. "I see through it all," she cried. "That Jobson is a hypocrite; and he is at the bottom of it all. I hate him; and Parkin worse. As for the assassin, I hope God, who saw him, will punish him. What I want to do is to kill Jobson and Parkin, one after another; kill them--kill them--kill them--I'll tell papa."

As for Jael, she could not speak her mind, but she panted heavily, and her fingers worked convulsively, and clutched themselves very tight at last.

When he had done his narrative, he said sadly, "I despise these fellows as much as you do; but they are too many for me. I am obliged to leave Hillsborough."

"What, let the wretches drive you away? I would never do that--if I was a man."

"What would you do, then?" asked Henry, his eye sparkling.

"Do? Why fight them; and beat them; and kill them, it is not as if they were brave men. They are only cunning cowards. I'd meet cunning with cunning. I'd outwit them somehow. I'd change my lodging every week, and live at little inns and places. I'd lock up every thing I used, as well as the rooms. I'd consult wiser heads, the editor of the Liberal, and the head of the police. I'd carry fire-arms, and have a bodyguard, night and day; but they should never say they had frightened me out of Hillsborough--if I was a man."

"You are all right," cried Henry. "I'll do all you advise me, and I won't be driven out of this place. I love it. I'll live in it or I'll die in it. I'll never leave it."

This was almost the last word that passed this delightful afternoon, when the sense of her own past injustice, the thrilling nature of the story told by the very sufferer, and, above all, the presence and the undisguised emotion of another sympathizing woman, thawed Grace Carden's reserve, warmed her courage, and carried her, quite unconsciously, over certain conventional bounds, which had, hitherto, been strictly observed in her intercourse with this young workman.

Henry himself felt that this day was an era in his love. When he left the door, he seemed to tread on air. He walked to the first cab-stand, took a conveyance to his mother's door, and soon he was locked in her arms.

She had been fretting for hours at his delay; but she never let him know it. The whole place was full of preparations for his comfort, and certain delicacies he liked were laid out on a little side board, and the tea-things set, including the silver teapot, used now on high occasions only.

She had a thousand questions to ask, and he to answer. And, while he ate, the poor woman leaned back, and enjoyed seeing him eat; and, while he talked, her fine eyes beamed with maternal joy. She reveled deliciously in his health, his beauty, and his safe return to her; and thought, with gentle complacency, they would soon return to London together.

In the morning, she got out a large, light box, and said. "Harry, dear, I suppose I may as well begin to pack up. You know I take longer than you do."

Henry blushed. "Pack up?" said he, hesitatingly. "We are not going away."

"Not going away, love? Why you agreed to leave, on account of those dreadful Unions."

"Oh, I was ill, and nervous, and out of spirits; but the air of Cairnhope has made a man of me. I shall stay here, and make our fortune."

"But the air of Cairnhope has not made you friends with the unions." She seemed to reflect a moment, then asked him at what time he had left Cairnhope.

"Eleven o'clock."

"Ah! And whom did you visit before you came to me?"

"You question me like a child, mother."

"Forgive me, dear. I will answer my own question. You called on some one who gave you bad advice."

"Oh, did I?"

"On some woman."

"Say, a lady"

"What does it matter to me?" cried Mrs. Little, wildly. "They are all my enemies. And this one is yours. It is a woman, who is not your mother, for she thinks more of herself than of you."

Henry had now to choose between his mother's advice, and Miss Carden's commands; and this made him rather sullen and irritable. He was glad to get out of his mother's house, and went direct to the works. Bayne welcomed him warmly, and, after some friendly congratulations and inquiries, pulled out two files of journals, and told him he had promised to introduce him to the editor of the Liberal. He then begged Henry to wait in the office, and read the files--he would not be gone many minutes.

The Constitutional gave a dry narrative of the outrage, and mourned the frequency of such incidents.

The Liberal gave a dramatic narrative, and said the miscreant must have lowered himself by a rope from the parapet, and passed the powder inside without entering. "He periled his life to perpetrate this crime; and he also risked penal servitude for ten years. That he was not deterred by the double risk, proves the influence of some powerful motive; and that motive must have been either a personal feud of a very virulent kind, or else trade fanaticism. From this alternative there is no escape."

Next day, both journals recorded a trade-meeting at "The Rising Sun." Delegates from the Edge-Tool Forgers' Union, and the Edge-Tool Handlers' Union, and some other representatives of Hillsborough Unions, were present, and passed a resolution repudiating, with disgust, the outrage that had been recently committed, and directed their secretaries to offer a reward of twenty pounds, the same to be paid to any person who would give such information as should lead to the discovery of the culprit.

On this the Constitutional commented as follows:--"Although we never for a moment suspected these respectable Unions of conniving at this enormity, yet it is satisfactory to find them not merely passive spectators, but exerting their energy, and spending their money, in a praiseworthy endeavor to discover and punish the offenders."

Henry laid down the paper, and his heart felt very warm to Jobson and Parkin. "Come," said he, "I am glad of that. They are not half a bad sort, those two, after all."

Then he took up the Liberal, and being young and generous, felt disgusted at its comment:--

"This appears to be creditable to the two Unions in question. But, unfortunately, long experience proves that these small rewards never lead to any discovery. They fail so invariably, that the Unions do not risk a shilling by proffering them. In dramatic entertainments the tragedy is followed by a farce: and so it is with these sanguinary crimes in Hillsborough; they are always followed by a repudiation, and offers of a trumpery reward quite disproportionate to the offense, and the only result of the farce is to divert attention from the true line of inquiry as to who enacted the tragedy. The mind craves novelty, and perhaps these delegates will indulge that desire by informing us for once, what was the personal and Corsican feud which led--as they would have us believe--to this outrage; and will, at the same time, explain to us why these outrages with gunpowder have never, either in this or in any preceding case, attacked any but non-union men."

When Henry had read thus far, the writer of the leader entered the room with Mr. Bayne.

A gentleman not above the middle height, but with a remarkable chest, both broad and deep; yet he was not unwieldy, like Dr. Amboyne, but clean-built, and symmetrical. An agreeable face, with one remarkable feature, a mouth full of iron resolution, and a slight humorous dimple at the corners.

He shook hands with Henry, and said, "I wish to ask you a question or two, in the way of business: but first let me express my sympathy, as a man, and my detestation of the ruffians that have so nearly victimized you."

This was very hearty, and Henry thanked him with some emotion. "But, sir," said he, "if I am to reply to your questions, you must promise me you will never publish my name."

"It is on account of his mother," whispered Bayne.

"Yes, sir. It was her misfortune to lose my father by a violent death, and of course you may imagine----"

"Say no more," said Mr. Holdfast: "your name shall not appear. And--let me see--does your mother know you work here?"

"Yes, she does."

"Then we had better keep Cheetham's name out as well."

"Oh, thank you, sir, thank you. Now I'll answer any questions you like."

"Well, then, I hear this outrage was preceded by several letters. Could I see them?"

"Certainly. I carry mine always in my pocket, for fear my poor mother should see them: and, Mr. Bayne, you have got Cheetham's."

In another minute the whole correspondence was on the table, and Mr. Holdfast laid it out in order, like a map, and went through it, taking notes. "What a comedy," said he. "All but the denouement. Now, Mr. Bayne, can any other manufacturers show me a correspondence of this kind?"

"Is there one that can't? There isn't a power-wheel, or a water-wheel, within eight miles of Hillsborough, that can't show you just such a correspondence as this; and rattening, or worse, at the tail of it."

Mr. Holdfast's eye sparkled like a diamond. "I'll make the round," said he. "And, Mr. Little, perhaps you will be kind enough to go with me, and let me question you, on the road. I have no sub-editor; no staff; I carry the whole journal on my head. Every day is a hard race between Time and me, and not a minute to spare."

Mr. Cheetham was expected at the works this afternoon: so Henry, on leaving Mr. Holdfast, returned to them, and found him there with Bayne, looking, disconsolately, over a dozen orders for carving-tools.

"Glad to see you again, my lad," said Cheetham. "Why, you look all the better."

"I'm none the worse, sir."

"Come to take your balance and leave me?" This was said half plaintively, half crossly.

"If you wish it, sir."

"Not I. How is it to be?"

"Well, sir, I say to you what you said to me the other day, Stick to me, and I'll stick to you."

"I'll stick to you."

Bayne held up his hands piteously to them both.

"What sir?" faltered he, turning to Cheetham. "after all your experience!" then to Henry, "What, fight the Trades, after the lesson they have given you?"

"I'll fight them all the more for that," said Henry, grinding his teeth; "fight them till all is blue."

"So will I. That for the Trades!"

"Heaven help you both!" groaned Bayne, and looked the picture of despair.

"You promised me shutters, with a detonator, sir."

"Ay, but you objected."

"That was before they blew me up."

"Just so. Shutters shall be hung to-morrow; and the detonators I'll fix myself."

"Thank you, sir. Would you mind engaging a watchman?"

Hum? Not--if you will share the expense."

"I'll pay one-third."

"Why should I pay two thirds? It is not like shutters and Bramah locks: they are property. However, he'll be good against rattening; and you have lost a fortnight, and there are a good many orders. Give me a good day's work, and we won't quarrel over the watchman." He then inquired, rather nervously, whether there was anything more.

"No, sir: we are agreed. And I'll give you good work, and full time."

The die was cast, and now he must go home and face his mother. For the first time this many years he was half afraid to go near her. He dreaded remonstrances and tears: tears that he could not dry; remonstrances that would worry him, but could not shake him.

This young man, who had just screwed his physical courage up to defy the redoubtable Unions had a fit of moral cowardice, and was so reluctant to encounter the gentlest woman in England, that he dined at a chop-house, and then sauntered into a music hall, and did not get home till past ten, meaning to say a few kind, hurried words, then yawn, and slip to bed.

But, meantime, Mrs. Little's mind had not been idle. She had long divined a young rival in her son's heart, and many a little pang of jealousy had traversed her own. This morning, with a quickness which may seem remarkable to those who have not observed the watchful keenness of maternal love, she had seen that her rival had worked upon Henry to resign his declared intention of leaving Hillsborough. Then she felt her way, and, in a moment, she had found the younger woman was the stronger.

She assumed as a matter of course, that this girl was in love with Henry (who would not be in love with him?), and had hung, weeping, round his neck, when he called from Cairnhope to bid her farewell, and had made him promise to stay. This was the mother's theory; wrong, but rational.

Then came the question, What should she do? Fight against youth and nature? Fight, unlikely to succeed, sure to irritate and disturb. Risk any of that rare affection and confidence her son had always given her?

While her thoughts ran this way, seven o'clock came, and no Henry. Eight o'clock, and no Henry. "Ah!" thought the mother, "that one word of mine has had this effect already."

She prepared an exquisite little supper. She made her own toilet with particular care; and, when all was ready, she sat down and comforted herself by reading his letters, and comparing his love with the cavalier behavior of so many sons in this island, the most unfilial country in Europe.

At half past ten Henry came up the stairs, not with the usual light elastic tread, but with slow, hesitating foot. Her quick ear caught that too, and her gentle bosom yearned. What, had she frightened him? He opened the door, and she rose to receive him all smiles. "You are rather late, dear," she said; "but all the better. It has given me an excuse for reading your dear letters all over again; and I have a thousand questions to ask you about Cairnhope. But sit down first, and have your supper."

Henry brightened up, and ate a good supper, and his mother plied him with questions, all about Cairnhope.

Here was an unexpected relief. Henry took a superficial view of all this. Sharp young men of twenty-four understand a great many things; but they can't quite measure their mothers yet.

Henry was selfishly pleased, but not ungrateful, and they passed a pleasant and affectionate time: and, as for leaving Hillsborough, the topic was avoided by tacit consent.

Next morning, after this easy victory, Henry took a cab and got to "Woodbine Villa" by a circuitous route. His heart beat high as he entered the room where Grace was seated. After the extraordinary warmth and familiarity she had shown him at the last interview, he took for granted he had made a lasting progress in her regard.

But she received him with a cold and distant manner, that quite benumbed him. Grace Carden's face and manner were so much more expressive than other people's, that you would never mistake or doubt the mood she was in; and this morning she was freezing.

The fact is, Miss Carden had been tormenting herself: and when beauty suffers, it is very apt to make others suffer as well.

"I am glad you are come, Mr. Little," said she, "for I have been taking myself to task ever since, and I blame myself very much for some things I said. In the first place, it was not for me" (here the fair speaker colored up to the temples) "to interfere in your affairs at all: and then, if I must take such a liberty, I ought to have advised you sensibly, and for your good. I have been asking people, and they all tell me it is madness for one person to fight against these Unions. Everybody gets crushed. So now let me hope you will carry out your wise intention, and leave Hillsborough; and then my conscience will be at ease."

Every word fell like an icicle on her hearer's heart. To please this cold, changeful creature, he had settled to defy the unchangeable Unions, and had been ready to resist his mother, and slight her immortal and unchanging love.

"You don't answer me, sir!" said Miss Carden, with an air of lofty surprise.

"I answered you yesterday," said he sullenly. "A man can't chop and change like a weathercock."

"But it is not changing, it's only going back to your own intention. You know you were going to leave Hillsborough, before I talked all that nonsense. Your story had set me on fire, and that's my only excuse. Well, now, the same person takes the liberty to give you wise and considerate advice, instead of hot, and hasty, romantic nonsense. Which ought you to respect most--folly or reason--from the same lips?"

Henry seemed to reflect. "That sounds reasonable," said he: "but, when you advised me not to show the white feather, you spoke your heart; now, you are only talking from your head. Then, your beautiful eyes flashed fire, and your soul was in your words: who could resist them? And you spoke to me like a friend; now you speak to me like an enemy."

"Oh, Mr. Little, that is ridiculous."

"You do, though. And I'm sure I don't know why."

"Nor I. Perhaps because I am cross with myself; certainly not with you."

"I am glad of that. Well, then, the long and the short is, you showed me you thought it cowardly to fly from the Trades. You wouldn't, said you, if you were a man. Well, I'm a man; and I'll do as you would do in my place. I'll not throw my life away, I'll meet craft with craft, and force with force; but fly I never will. I'll fight while I've a leg to stand on."

With these words he began to work on the bust, in a quiet dogged way that was, nevertheless, sufficiently expressive.

Grace looked at him silently for half a minute, and then rose from her chair.

"Then," said she, "I must go for somebody of more authority than I am." She sailed out of the room.

Henry asked Jael who she was gone for.

"It will be her papa," said Jael.

"As if I care for what he says."

"I wouldn't show her that, if I was you," said Jael, quietly, but with a good deal of weight.

"You are right," said Henry. "You are a good girl. I don't know which is the best, you or Martha. I say, I promised to go to Cairnhope some Sunday, and see them all. Shall I drive you over?"

"And bring me back at night?"

"If you like. I must come back."

"I'll ask Miss Carden."

The words were quiet and composed, but the blushing face beamed with unreasonable happiness; and Grace, who entered at that moment with her father, was quite struck with its eloquence; she half started, but took no further notice just then. "There, papa," said she, "this is Mr. Little."

Mr. Carden was a tall gentleman, with somewhat iron features, but a fine head of gray hair; rather an imposing personage; not the least pompous though; quite a man of the world, and took a business view of everything, matrimony, of course, included.

"Oh, this is Mr. Little, is it, whose work we all admire so much?"

"Yes, papa."

"And whose adventure has made so much noise?"

"Yes, papa."

"By-the-bye, there is an article to-day on you: have you seen it? No? But you should see it; it is very smart. My dear" (to Jael), "will you go to my study, and bring the Liberal here?"

"Yes, but meantime, I want you to advise him not to subject himself to more gunpowder and things, but to leave the town; that is all the wretches demand."

"And that," said Henry, with a sly, deferential tone, "is a good deal to demand in a free country, is it not, sir?"

"Indeed it is. Ah, here comes the Liberal. Somebody read the article to us, while he works. I want to see how he does it."

Curiosity overpowered Grace's impatience, for a moment, and she read the notice out with undisguised interest.

"'In our first remarks upon this matter, we merely laid down an alternative which admits of no dispute; and, abstaining from idle conjectures, undertook to collect evidence. We have now had an interview with the victim of that abominable outrage. Mr.---- is one of those superior workmen who embellish that class for a few years, but invariably rise above it, and leave it' (there--Mr. Little!)--'He has informed us that he is a stranger in Hillsborough, lives retired, never sits down in a public-house, and has not a single enemy in Hillsborough, great or small. He says that his life was saved by his fellow-workmen, and that as he lay scorched--'(Oh, dear!')

"Well, go on, Grace."

"It is all very well to say go on, papa--'scorched and bleeding on the ground and unable to distinguish faces' (poor, poor Mr. Little!) 'he heard, on all sides of him, expressions of rugged sympathy and sobs, and tears, from rough, but--manly fellows, who--'(oh! oh! oh!")

Grace could not go on for whimpering, and Jael cried, for company. Henry left off carving, and turned away his head, touched to the heart by this sweet and sudden sympathy.

"How badly you read," said Mr. Carden, and took the journal from her. He read in a loud business-like monotone, that, like some blessed balm, dried every tear. "'Manly fellows who never shed a tear before: this disposed of one alternative, and narrowed the inquiry. It was not a personal feud; therefore it was a Trade outrage, or it was nothing. We now took evidence bearing on the inquiry thus narrowed; and we found the assault had been preceded by a great many letters, all of them breathing the spirit of Unionism, and none of them intimating a private wrong. These letters, taken in connection, are a literary curiosity; and we find there is scarcely a manufacturer in the place who has not endured a similar correspondence, and violence at the end of it. This curious chapter of the human mind really deserves a separate heading, and we introduce it to our readers as

"'First of all comes a letter to the master intimating that he is doing something objectionable to some one of the many Unions that go to make a single implement of hardware. This letter has three features. It is signed with a real name. It is polite. It is grammatical.

"'If disregarded, it is speedily followed by another. No. 2 is grammatical, or thereabouts; but, under a feigned politeness, the insolence of a vulgar mind shows itself pretty plainly, and the master is reminded what he suffered on some former occasion when he rebelled against the trades. This letter is sometimes anonymous, generally pseudonymous.

"'If this reminder of the past and intimation of the future is disregarded, the refractory master gets a missive, which begins with an affectation of coarse familiarity, and then rises, with a ludicrous bound, into brutal and contemptuous insolence. In this letter, grammar is flung to the winds, along with good manners; but spelling survives, by a miracle. Next comes a short letter, full of sanguinary threats, and written in, what we beg leave to christen, the Dash dialect, because, though used by at least three million people in England, and three thousand in Hillsborough, it can only be printed with blanks, the reason being simply this, that every sentence is measled with oaths and indecencies. These letters are also written phonetically, and, as the pronunciation, which directs the spelling, is all wrong, the double result is prodigious. Nevertheless, many of these pronunciations are ancient, and were once universal. An antiquarian friend assures us the orthography of these blackguards, the scum of the nineteenth century, is wonderfully like that of a mediæval monk or baron.

"'When the correspondence has once descended to the Dash dialect, written phonetically, it never remounts toward grammar, spelling or civilization; and the next in the business is rattening, or else beating, or shooting, or blowing-up the obnoxious individual by himself, or along with a houseful of people quite strange to the quarrel. Now, it is manifest to common sense, that all this is one piece of mosaic, and that the criminal act it all ends in is no more to be disconnected from the last letter, than the last letter from its predecessor, or letter three from letter two. Here is a crime first gently foreshadowed, then grimly intimated, then directly threatened, then threatened in words that smell of blood and gunpowder, and then--done. The correspondence and the act reveal--

"'In face of this evidence, furnished by themselves, the trades Unions, some member of which has committed this crime, will do well to drop the worn-out farce of offering a trumpery reward and to take a direct and manly course. They ought to accept Mr.----'s preposterously liberal offer, and admit him to the two Unions, and thereby disown the criminal act in the form most consolatory to the sufferer: or else they should face the situation, and say, "This act was done under our banner, though not by our order, and we stand by it." The Liberal will continue to watch the case.'"

"This will be a pill," said Mr. Carden, laying down the paper. "Why, they call the Liberal the workman's advocate."

"Yes, papa," said Grace; "but how plainly he shows---- But Mr. Little is a stranger, and even this terrible lesson has not---- So do pray advise him."

"I shall be very happy; but, when you are my age, you will know it is of little use intruding advice upon people."

"Oh, Mr. Little will treat it with proper respect, coming from one so much older than himself, and better acquainted with this wretched town. Will you not, Mr. Little?" said she, with so cunning a sweetness that the young fellow was entrapped, and assented, before he knew what he was about; then colored high at finding himself committed.

Mr. Carden reflected a moment. He then said, "I can't take upon myself to tell any man to give up his livelihood. But one piece of advice I can conscientiously give Mr. Little."

"Yes, papa."

"And that is--TO INSURE HIS LIFE."

"Oh, papa!" cried Grace.

As for Henry he was rather amused, and his lip curled satirically. But the next moment he happened to catch sight of Jael Dence's face; her gray eyes were expanded with a look of uneasiness; and, directly she caught his eye she fixed it, and made him a quick movement of the head, directing him to assent.

There was something so clear and decided in the girl's manner that it overpowered Henry who had no very clear idea to oppose to it, and he actually obeyed the nod of this girl, whom he had hitherto looked on as an amiable simpleton.

"I have no objection to that," said he, turning to Mr. Carden. Then, after another look at Jael, he said, demurely, "Is there any insurance office you could recommend?"

Mr. Carden smiled. "There is only one I have a right to recommend, and that is the 'Gosshawk.' I am a director. But," said he, with sudden stiffness, "I could furnish you with the names of many others."

Henry saw his way clear by this time. "No, sir, if I profit by your advice, the least I can do is to choose the one you are a director of."

Grace, who had latterly betrayed uneasiness and irritation, now rose, red as fire. "The conversation is taking a turn I did not at all intend," said she, and swept out of the room with royal disdain.

Her father apologized carelessly for her tragical exit. "That is a young lady who detests business; but she does not object to its fruits--dresses, lace, footmen, diamonds, and a carriage to drive about in. On the contrary, she would be miserable without them."

"I should hope she never will be without them, sir."

"I'll take care of that."

Mr. Carden said this rather dryly, and then retired for a minute; and Grace who was not far off, with an ear like a hare, came back soon after.

But in the meantime Henry left his seat and went to Jael, and, leaning over her as she worked, said, "There is more in that head of yours than I thought."

"Oh, they all talk before me," said Jael, blushing faintly, and avoiding his eye.

"Jael Dence," said the young man, warmly, "I'm truly obliged to you."

"What for?"

"For your good advice. I didn't see how good it was till after I had taken it."

"I'm afeard Miss Grace gave you better."

"She advised me against my heart. What is the use of that?"

"Ay, young men are willful."

"Come, come, don't you go back. You are my friend and counselor."

"That is something," said Jael, in a low voice; and her hands trembled at her side.

"Why, my dear girl, what's the matter?"

"Hush! hush?"

Grace came in, that moment, with a superb air. She settled herself on the sofa.

"Now, it is my turn, if you please. Pray, sir, do you think your life will be any safer for your insuring it? Insuring does not mean that you are not to be killed; but that, when you are, for your obstinacy, somebody else will get paid some money, to dance with over your grave."

"I beg your pardon, Grace," said Mr. Carden, entering with some printed papers in his hand. "That is not the only use of an insurance. He may want to marry, or to borrow a sum of money to begin business; and then a policy of insurance, with two or three premiums paid, smooths the difficulty. Everybody should make a will, and everybody should insure his life."

"Well then, sir, I will do both."

"Stop!" said Mr. Carden, who could now afford to be candid. "First of all, you ought to satisfy yourself of the flourishing condition of the company." He handed him a prospectus. "This will show you our capital, and our disbursements last year, and the balance of profit declared. And this gives the balance sheet of the 'Vulture' and the 'Falcon,' which have assigned their business to us, and are now incorporated in the 'Gosshawk.'"

"Oh, what a voracious bird!" observed Grace. "I hope these other chickabiddies will not prove indigestible. Were they plucked first, papa? or did the 'Gosshawk' swallow them feathers and all?"

Little laughed heartily at this pert sally, but Mr. Carden winced under it.

Then Grace saw she was not quite weaponless, and added, "After such a meal, as that, Mr. Little, you will go down like a crumb."

"Grace, that is enough," said Mr. Carden, rather severely.

Grace held her tongue directly, and the water came into her eyes. Anything like serious remonstrance was a novelty to her.

When Henry had read the papers, Mr. Carden asked him, rather carelessly, what sum he wished to be insured for.

Now Henry had so little wish about the matter, that he had not given it a thought, and the question took him quite aback. He looked helplessly at Jael. To his surprise, she decided on the sum for him, without a moment's hesitation, and conveyed the figure with that dexterity which the simplest of her sex can command whenever telegraphy is wanted. She did it with two unbroken movements; she put up all the fingers of her right hand to her brow, and that meant five: then she turned her hand rapidly, so as to hide her mouth from the others, who were both on her right hand, and she made the word thousand clear, with her lips and tongue, especially the "th."

But the sum staggered Henry; and made him think he must be misinterpreting her.

He hesitated, to gain time. "Hum!" said he, "the sum?"

Jael repeated her pantomime as before.

Still Henry doubted, and, to feel his way, said, half interrogatively, "Five--thou--sand?"

Jael nodded.

"Five thousand pounds," said Henry, as bold as brass.

"Five thousand pounds!" cried Mr. Carden. "A workman insure his life for five thousand pounds!"

"Well, a man's life is worth five thousand pounds, or it is worth nothing. And, sir, how long do you think I shall be a workman, especially in Hillsborough, where from workman to master is no more than hopping across a gutter?"

Mr. Carden smiled approval. "But five thousand pounds! The annual premium will be considerable. May I ask about how much you make a year?"

"Oh, papa!"

"Well, sir, Mr. Cheetham pays me £300 a year, at the rate of, and I can make another £100 by carving at odd times. But, if you doubt my ability, let us stay as we are, sir. It was your proposal, not mine, you know."

"Young man," said Mr. Carden, "never be peppery in business." He said this so solemnly and paternally, it sounded like the eleventh commandment.

To conclude, it was arranged Henry should take the higher class of insurance, which provided for accidents, voyages, everything, and should be insured for £5000, provided the physician appointed by the company should pronounce him free from disease.

Henry then rose, and said, sorrowfully, to Grace, "You will not see me here very often now; and never on Saturday afternoon or Monday morning. I am not going to have some blackguard tracking me, and flinging a can of gunpowder in at your window. When I do come, it will be in the morning, and on a working day; and I shall perhaps go ten miles round to get here. It must be diamond cut diamond, for many a month to come, between the Trades and me." He uttered these words with manly gravity, as one who did not underrate the peril he was resolved to face; and left them with a respectful bow.

"That's a rising man," said Mr. Carden; "and may draw a hundred of his class to the 'Gosshawk.' It was a good stroke of business, quite out of the common."

Grace said not a word, but she shook her head and looked pained and ill at ease. Jael watched her fixedly.

Henry called at the works that night, and examined the new defenses, with Mr. Cheetham. He also bought a powerful magnifying-glass; and next morning he came to the factory, examined the cinders, and everything else, with the magnifier, lighted his forge, and resumed his work.

At dinner-time he went out and had his chop, and read the Liberal; it contained a letter from Jobson, in reply to the editor.

Jobson deplored the criminal act, admitted that the two Unions had decided no individual could be a forger, a handler, and a cutler; such an example was subversive of all the Unions in the city, based, as they were, on subdivision of crafts. "But," said Mr. Jobson, "we were dealing with the matter in a spirit quite inconsistent with outrages, and I am so anxious to convince the public of this, that I have asked a very experienced gentleman to examine our minute-books, and report accordingly."

This letter was supplemented by one from Mr. Grotait, secretary of the Saw-Grinders, which ran thus:--"Messrs. Parkin and Jobson have appealed to me to testify to certain facts. I was very reluctant to interfere, for obvious reasons; but was, at last, prevailed on to examine the minute-books of those two Unions, and they certainly do prove that on the very evening before the explosion, those trades had fully discussed Mr. ----'s case" (the real name was put, but altered by the editor), "and had disposed of it as follows. They agreed, and this is entered accordingly, to offer him his traveling expenses (first class) to London, and one pound per week, from their funds, until such time as he should obtain employment. I will only add, that both these secretaries spoke kindly to me of Mr. ----; and, believing them to be sincere, I ventured to advise them to mark their disapproval of the criminal act, by offering him two pounds per week, instead of one pound; which advice they have accepted very readily."

Henry was utterly confounded by these letters.

Holdfast commented on them thus:--

"Messrs. Jobson and Parkin virtually say that if A, for certain reasons, pushes a man violently out of Hillsborough, and B draws him gently out of Hillsborough for the same reasons, A and B can not possibly be co-operating. Messrs. Parkin and Jobson had so little confidence in this argument, which is equivalent to saying there is no such thing as cunning in trade, that they employed a third party to advance it with all the weight of his popularity and seeming impartiality. But who is this candid person that objects to assume the judge, and assumes the judge? He is the treasurer and secretary of an Union that does not number three hundred persons; yet in that small Union, of which he is dictator, there has been as much rattening, and more shooting, and blowing-up wholesale and retail, with the farcical accompaniment of public repudiation, than in all the other Unions put together. We consider the entrance of this ingenuous personage on the scene a bad omen, and shall watch all future proceedings with increased suspicion."

Henry had hardly done reading this, when a man came into the works, and brought him his fifteen pounds back from Mr. Jobson, and a line, offering him his expenses to London, and two pounds per week, from the Edge-Tool Forgers' box, till he should find employment. Henry took his money, and sent back word that the proposal came too late; after the dastardly attempt to assassinate him, he should defy the Unions, until they accepted his terms. Jobson made no reply. And Henry defied the Unions.

The Unions lay still, like some great fish at the bottom of a pool, and gave no sign of life or animosity. This did not lull Henry into a false security. He never relaxed a single precaution. He avoided "Woodbine Villa;" he dodged and doubled like a hare, to hide his own abode. But he forged, handled, and finished, in spite of the Unions.

The men were civil to him in the yard, and he had it all his own way, apparently.

He was examined by a surgeon, and reported healthy. He paid the insurance premium, and obtained the policy. So now he felt secure, under the ægis of the Press, and the wing of the "Gosshawk." By-and-by, that great fish I have mentioned gave a turn of its tail, and made his placid waters bubble a little.

A woman came into the yard, with a can of tea for her husband, and a full apron. As she went out, she emptied a set of tools out of her apron on to an old grindstone, and slipped out.

The news of this soon traveled into the office, and both Cheetham and Bayne came out to look at them.

They were a set of carving-tools, well made, and highly polished; and there was a scrap of paper with this distich:

"We are Hillsborough made,
Both haft and blade."

Cheetham examined them, and said, "Well, they are clever fellows. I declare these come very near Little's: call him down and let us draw him."

Bayne called to Henry, and that brought him down, and several more, who winded something.

"Just look at these," said Cheetham.

Little colored: he saw the finger of the Unions at once, and bristled all over with caution and hostility.

"I see them, sir. They are very fair specimens of cutlery; and there are only about twenty tools wanting to make a complete set; but there is one defect in them as carving-tools."

"What is that?"

"They are useless. You can't carve wood with them. None but a practical carver can design these tools, and then he must invent and make the steel molds first. Try and sell them in London or Paris, you'll soon find the difference. Mr. Bayne, I wonder you should call me from my forge to examine 'prentice-work." And, with this, he walked off disdainfully, but not quite easy in his mind, for he had noticed a greedy twinkle in Cheetham's eye.

The next day all the grinders in Mr. Cheetham's employ, except the scissors-grinders, rose, all of a sudden, like a flock of partridges, and went out into the road.

"What is up now?" inquired Bayne. The answer was, their secretaries had sent for them.

They buzzed in the road, for a few minutes, and then came back to work.

At night there was a great meeting at the "Cutlers' Arms," kept by Mr. Grotait.

At noon the next day, all the grinders aforesaid in Mr. Cheetham's employ walked into the office, and left, each of them, a signed paper to this effect:

"This is to give you notice that I will leave your service a week after the date thereof." (Meaning "hereof," I presume.)

Cheetham asked several of them what was up. Some replied civilly, it was a trade matter. Others suggested Mr. Cheetham knew as much about it as they did.

Not a single hot or uncivil word was spoken on either side. The game had been played too often for that, and with results too various.

One or two even expressed a sort of dogged regret. The grinder Reynolds, a very honest fellow, admitted, to Mr. Cheetham, that he thought it a sorry trick, for a hundred men to strike against one that had had a squeak for his life. "But no matter what I think or what I say, I must do what the Union bids me, sir."

"I know that, my poor fellow," said Cheetham. "I quarrel with none of you. I fight you all. The other masters, in this town, are mice, but I'm a man."

This sentiment he repeated very often during the next six days.

The seventh came and the grinders never entered the works.

Cheetham looked grave. However, he said to Bayne, "Go and find out where they are. Do it cleverly now. Don't be noticed."

Bayne soon ascertained they were all in the neighboring public-houses.

"I thought so," said Cheetham. "They will come in, before night. They sha'n't beat me, the vagabonds. I'm a man, I'm not a mouse."

"Orders pouring in, sir," sighed Bayne. "And the grinders are rather behind the others in their work already."

"They must have known that: or why draw out the grinders? How could they know it?"

"Sir," said Bayne, "they say old Smitem is in this one. Wherever he is, the master's business is known, or guessed, heaven knows how; and, if there is a hole in his coat, that hole is hit. Just look at the cleverness of it, sir. Here we are, wrong with the forgers and handlers. Yet they come into the works and take their day's wages. But they draw out the grinders, and mutilate the business. They hurt you as much as if they struck, and lost their wages. But no, they want their wages to help pay the grinders on strike. Your only chance was to discharge every man in the works, the moment the grinders gave notice."

"Why didn't you tell me so, then?"

"Because I'm not old Smitem. He can see a thing beforehand. I can see it afterward. I'm like the weatherwise man's pupil; as good as my master, give me time. The master could tell you, at sunrise, whether the day would be wet or dry, and the pupil he could tell you at sunset: and that is just the odds between old Smitem and me."

"Well, if he is old Smitem, I'm old Fightem."

At night, he told Bayne he had private information, that the grinders were grumbling at being made a cat's-paw of by the forgers and the handlers. "Hold on," said he; "they will break up before morning."

At ten o'clock next day he came down to the works, and some peremptory orders had poured in. "They must wait," said he, peevishly.

At twelve he said, "How queer the place seems, and not a grindstone going. It seems as still as the grave. I'm a man; I'm not a mouse."

Mr. Cheetham repeated this last fact in zoology three times, to leave no doubt of it in his own mind, I suppose.

At 1.00, he said he would shut up the works rather than be a slave.

At 1.15 he blustered.

At 1.20 he gave in: collapsed in a moment, like a punctured bladder. "Bayne," said he, with a groan, "go to Jobson, and ask him to come and talk this foolish business over."

"Excuse me, sir," said Bayne. "Don't be offended; but you are vexed and worried, and whoever the Union sends to you will be as cool as marble. I have just heard it is Redcar carries the conditions."

"What, the foreman of my own forgers! Is he to dictate to me?" cried Cheetham, grinding his teeth with indignation.

"Well, sir, what does it matter?" said Bayne, soothingly. "He is no more than a mouthpiece."

"Go for him," said Cheetham, sullenly.

"But, sir, I can't bear that your own workman should see you so agitated."

"Oh, I shall be all right the moment I see my man before me."

Bayne went off, and soon returned with Redcar. The man had his coat on, but had not removed his leathern apron.

Cheetham received him as the representative of the Unions. "Sit down, Redcar, and let us put an end to this little bother. What do you require?"

"Mr. Little's discharge, sir."

"Are you aware he is with me on a month's notice?"

"They make a point of his leaving the works at once, sir; and I was to beg you to put other hands into his room."

"It is taking a great liberty to propose that."

"Nay. They only want to be satisfied. He has given a vast o' trouble."

"I'll give him a month's warning. If I discharge him on the spot, he can sue me."

"That has been thought on. If he sues you, you can talk to the Unions, and they will act with you. But the grinders are not to come in till Little is out."

"Well, so be it, then."

"And his rooms occupied by Union men?"

"If I swallow the bolus, I may as well swallow the pills. Anything more?"

"The grinders are not to lose their time; a day and a half."

"What! am I to pay them for not working?"

"Well, sir, if we had come to you, of course the forgers and handlers would have paid the grinders for lost time; but, as you have come to us, you will have to pay them."

Cheetham made a wry face; but acquiesced.

"And then, sir," said Redcar, "there's another little matter. The incidental expenses of the strike."

"I don't know what you mean."

"The expenses incurred by the secretaries, and a little present to another gentleman, who advised us. It comes to thirty pounds altogether."

"What!" cried Cheetham, struggling with his rising choler. "You want me to pay men thirty pounds for organizing a strike, that will cost me so dear, and rob me of a whole trade that was worth £300 a year? Why not charge me for the gunpowder you blew up Little with, and spoiled my forge? No, Bayne, no; this is too unjust and too tyrannical. Flesh and blood won't bear it. I'll shut up the works, and go back to my grindstone. Better live on bread and water than live like a slave."

Redcar took a written paper out of his pocket. "There are the terms written down," said he, "if you sign them, the strike ends; if you don't, it continues--till you do."

Cheetham writhed under the pressure. Orders were pouring in; trade brisk; hands scarce. Each day would add a further loss of many pounds for wages, and doubtless raise fresh exactions. He gulped down something very like a sob, and both his hand and his voice shook with strong passion as he took the pen. "I'll sign it; but if ever my turn comes, I'll remember this against you. This shows what they really are, Bayne. Oh, if ever you workmen get power, GOD HELP THE WORLD!"

These words seemed to come in a great prophetic agony out of a bursting heart.

But the representative of the Unions was neither moved by them nor irritated.

"All right," said he, phlegmatically; "the winner takes his bite: the loser gets his bark: that's reason."

Henry Little was in his handling-room, working away, with a bright perspective before him, when Bayne knocked at the door, and entered with Redcar. Bayne's face wore an expression so piteous, that Henry divined mischief at once.

"Little, my poor fellow, it is all over. We are obliged to part with you."

"Cheetham has thrown me over?"

"What could he do? I am to ask you to vacate these rooms, that we may get our half-day out of the grinders."

Henry turned pale, but there was no help for it.

He got up in a very leisurely way; and, while he was putting on his coat, he told Bayne, doggedly, he should expect his month's salary.

As he was leaving, Redcar spoke to him in rather a sheepish way. "Shake hands, old lad," said he; "thou knows one or t'other must win; and there's not a grain of spite against thee. It's just a trade matter."

Henry stood with his arms akimbo, and looked at Redcar. "I was in hopes," said he, grinding his teeth, "you were going to ask me to take a turn with you in the yard, man to man. But I can't refuse my hand to one of my own sort that asks it. There 'tis. After all, you deserve to win, for you are true to each other; but a master can't be true to a man, nor to anything on earth, but his pocket."

He then strolled out into the yard, with his hands in his pockets, and whistled "The Harmonious Blacksmith" very sick at heart.

The strike was over, the grinders poured into the works, and the grindstones revolved. Henry Little leaned against an angle of the building, and listened with aching heart to their remorseless thunder. He stood there disconsolate--the one workman out of work--and sipped the bitter cup, defeat. Then he walked out at the gates, and wandered languidly into the streets. He was miserable, and had nobody to mourn to, for the main cause of his grief lay beneath the surface of this defeat; and how could he reveal it, now that his ambitious love looked utter madness? Young as he was, he had seen there is no sympathy in the world for any man who loves out of his sphere. Indeed, whatever cures or crushes such a passion, is hailed by the by-standers as a sharp but wholesome medicine.

He sauntered about, and examined all the shops with lack-luster eye. He looked in at everything, but observed nothing, scarcely saw anything. All his senses were turned inward. It was such a pitiable and galling result of a gallant fight. Even the insurance office had got the better of him. It had taken one-third of his savings, and the very next day his trade was gone, and his life in no danger. The "Gosshawk" had plucked him, and the trade had tied his hands. Rack his invention how he would, he could see no way of becoming a master in Hillsborough, except by leaving Hillsborough, and working hard and long in some other town. He felt in his own heart the love and constancy to do this; but his reason told him such constancy would be wasted; for while he was working at a distance, the impression, if any, he had made on her would wear away, and some man born with money, would step in and carry her gayly off. This thought returned to him again and again, and exasperated him so at last, that he resolved to go to "Woodbine Villa," and tell her his heart before he left the place. Then he should be rejected, no doubt, but perhaps pitied, and not so easily forgotten as if he had melted silently away.

He walked up the hill, first rapidly, then slowly. He called at "Woodbine Villa."

The answer was "Not at home."

"Everything is against me," said he.

He wandered wearily down again, and just at the entrance of the town he met a gentleman with a lady on each arm, and one of those ladies was Miss Carden. The fortunate cavalier was Mr. Coventry, whom Henry would have seen long before this, but he had been in Paris for the last four months. He had come back fuller than ever of agreeable gossip, and Grace was chatting away to him, and beaming with pleasure, as innocent girls do, when out on a walk with a companion they like. She was so absorbed she did not even see Henry Little. He went off the pavement to make room for their tyrannical crinolines, and passed unnoticed.

He had flushed with joy at first sight of her, but now a deadly qualm seized him. The gentleman was handsome and commanding; Miss Carden seemed very happy, hanging on his arm; none the less bright and happy that he, her humble worshiper, was downcast and wretched.

It did not positively prove much; yet it indicated how little he must be to her: and somehow it made him realize more clearly the great disadvantage at which he lay, compared with an admirer belonging to her own class. Hitherto his senses had always been against his reason: but now for once they co-operated with his judgment, and made him feel that, were he to toil for years in London, or Birmingham, and amass a fortune, he should only be where that gentleman was already; and while the workman, far away, was slaving, that gentleman and others would be courting her. She might refuse one or two. But she would not refuse them all.

Then, in his despair, he murmured, "Would to God I had never seen her!"

He made a fierce resolve he would go home, and tell his mother she could pack up.

He quickened his steps, for fear his poor sorrowful heart should falter.

But, when he had settled on this course, lo! a fountain of universal hatred seemed to bubble in his heart. He burned to inflict some mortal injury upon Jobson, Parkin, Grotait, Cheetham, and all who had taken a part, either active or passive, in goading him to despair. Now Mr. Cheetham's works lay right in his way; and it struck him he could make Cheetham smart a little. Cheetham's god was money. Cheetham had thrown him over for money. He would go to Cheetham, and drive a dagger into his pocket.

He walked into the office. Mr. Cheetham was not there: but he found Bayne and Dr. Amboyne.

"Mr. Bayne," said he, abruptly, "I am come for my month's wages."

The tone was so aggressive, Bayne looked alarmed. "Why, Little, poor Mr. Cheetham is gone home with a bad headache, and a sore heart."

"All the better. I don't want to tell him to his face he is a bragging cur; all I want out of him now is my money; and you can pay me that."

The pacific Bayne cast a piteous glance at Dr. Amboyne. "I have told you the whole business, sir. Oughtn't Mr. Little to wait till to-morrow, and talk it over with Mr. Cheetham? I'm only a servant: and a man of peace."

"Whether he ought or not, I think I can answer for him that he will."

"I can't, sir," said Henry, sturdily. "I leave the town to-morrow."

"Oh, that alters the case. But must you leave us so soon?"

"Yes, sir."

"I am very sorry for that. Tell me your reason. I don't ask out of mere curiosity."

Henry replied with less than his usual candor; "Is it not reason enough for leaving a place, that my life has been attempted in it, and now my livelihood is taken?"

"Those are strong reasons. But, on the other hand, your life is no longer in danger; and your livelihood is not gone; for, to speak plainly, I came over here the moment I heard you were discharged, to ask if you would enter my service on the same terms as Mr. Cheetham gave you, only guineas instead of pounds."

"What, turn doctor?"

"Oh dear, no; the doctors' Union would forbid that. No, Mr. Little, I am going to ask you to pay me a compliment; to try my service blindfold for one week. You can leave it if you don't like it; but give me one week's trial."

"How can I refuse you that?" said Henry, hanging his head. "You have been a good friend to me. But, sir, mark my words, this place will be my destruction. Well, when am I to begin work?"

"To-morrow, at ten."

"So be it," said Henry, wearily, then left the works and went home; but, as he went, he said to himself. "It is not my doing." And his double-faced heart glowed and exulted secretly.

He told his mother how the Trades had beaten him, and he was out of work.

Mrs. Little consoled him hypocritically. She was delighted. Then he told her his departure had been delayed by Dr. Amboyne: that made her look a little anxious.

"One question, dear: now the Union has beaten you, they will not be so spiteful, will they?"

"Oh, no. That is all over. The conquerors can afford to be good-natured. Confound them!"

"Then that is all I care about. Then do not leave Hillsborough. Why should you? Wait here patiently. You do not know what may turn up."

"What, mother, do you want to stay here now?" said Henry, opening his eyes with astonishment.

"Wherever my son is happy and safe from harm, there I wish to stay--of course."

Next morning Henry called on Dr. Amboyne, and found him in his study, teaching what looked a boy of sixteen, but was twenty-two, to read monosyllables. On Little's entrance the pupil retired from his uphill work, and glowered with vacillating eyes. The lad had a fair feminine face, with three ill things in it: a want, a wildness, and a weakness. To be sure Henry saw it at a disadvantage: for vivid intelligence would come now and then across this mild, wild, vacant face, like the breeze that sweeps a farm-yard pond.

"Good-morning, Little. This is your fellow-workman."

"He does not look up to much," said Henry, with all a workman's bluntness.

"What, you have found him out! Never mind; he can beat the town at one or two things, and it is for these we will use him. Some call him an idiot. The expression is neat and vigorous, but not precise; so I have christened him the Anomaly. Anomaly, this is Mr. Little; go and shake hands with him, and admire him."

The Anomaly went directly, and gazed into Little's face for some time.

He then made his report. "He is beautiful and black."

"I've seen him blacker. Now leave off admiring him, and look at these pictures while I prose. Two thousand philosophers are writing us dead with 'Labor and Capital.' But I vary the bore. 'Life, Labor, and Capital,' is my chant: and, whereas Life has hitherto been banished from the discussion, I put Life in its true place, at the head of the trio. (And Life I divide into long Life, and happy Life.) The subject is too vast to be dealt with all at once; but I'll give you a peep of it. The rustic laborer in the South sells his labor for too little money to support life comfortably. That is a foul wrong. The rustic laborer in the North has small wages, compared with a pitman, or a cutler; but he has enough for health, and he lives longer and more happily than either the pitman or the cutler; so that account is square, in my view of things. But now dive into the Hillsborough trades, and you will find this just balance of Life, Labor, and Capital regarded in some, but defied in others: a forger is paid as much or more than a dry-grinder, though forging is a hard but tolerably healthy trade, and dry-grinding means an early death after fifteen years of disease and misery. The file-cutters are even more killed and less paid. What is to be done then? Raise the wages of the more homicidal trades! But this could only be done by all the Unions acting in concert. Now the rival philosophers, who direct the Unions, are all against Democritus--that's myself; they set no value on life. And indeed the most intelligent one, Grotait, smiles blandly on Death, and would grind his scythe for him--at the statement price--because that scythe thins the labor market, and so helps keep up prices."

"Then what can we do? I'm a proof one can't fight the Unions."

"Do? Why, lay hold of the stick at the other end. Let Pseudo-Philosophy set the means above the end, and fix its shortsighted eyes on Labor and Capital, omitting Life. (What does it profit a file-cutter if he gains his master's whole capital and loses his own life?) But you and I, Mr. Little, are true philosophers and the work we are about to enter on is--saving cutlers' lives."

"I'd rather help take them."

"Of course; and that is why I made the pounds guineas."

"All right, sir," said Henry, coloring. "I don't expect to get six guineas a week for whistling my own tune. How are we to do the job?"

"By putting our heads together. You have, on the side of your temple, a protuberance, which I have noticed in the crania of inventors. So I want you to go round the works, and observe for yourself how Life is thrown gayly away, in a moment, by needless accident, and painfully gnawed away by steel-dust, stone grit, sulphuret of lead, etc.; and then cudgel your brain for remedies."

"Sir," said Henry, "I am afraid I shall not earn my money. My heart is not in the job."

"Revenge is what you would like to be at, not Philanthropy--eh?"

"Ay, doctor." And his black eye flashed fire.

"Well, well, that is natural. Humor my crotchet just now, and perhaps I may humor yours a month or two hence. I think I could lay my hand on the fellow who blew you up."

"What, sir! Ah! tell me that, and I'll do as much philanthropy as you like--after--"

"After you have punched your fellow-creature's head."

"But it is impossible, sir. How can you know? These acts are kept as secret as the grave."

"And how often has the grave revealed its secrets to observant men? Dr. Donne sauntered about among graves, and saw a sexton turn up a skull. He examined it, found a nail in it, identified the skull, and had the murderess hung. She was safe from the sexton and the rest of the parish, but not from a stray observer. Well, the day you were blown up, I observed something, and arrived at a conclusion, by my art."

"What, physic?"

"Oh, dear, no; my other art, my art of arts, that I don't get paid for; the art of putting myself in other people's places. I'll tell you. While you lay on the ground, in Mr. Cheetham's yard, I scanned the workmen's faces. They were full of pity and regret, and were much alike in expression--all but one. That one looked a man awakened from a dream. His face was wild, stupid, confused, astonished. 'Hallo!' said I, 'why are your looks so unlike the looks of your fellows?' Instantly I put myself in his place. I ceased to be the Democritus, or laughing philosopher of Hillsborough, and became a low uneducated brute of a workman. Then I asked this brute, viz, myself, why I was staring and glaring in that way, stupidly astonished, at the injured man? 'Were you concerned in the criminal act, ye blackguard?' said I to myself. The next step was to put myself in the place of the criminal. I did so; and I realized that I, the criminal, had done the act to please the Unions, and expecting the sympathy of all Union workmen to be with me. Also that I, being an ignorant brute, had never pictured to myself what suffering I should inflict. But what was the result? I now saw the sufferer, and did not like my own act; and I found all the sympathy of my fellows went with him, and that I was loathed and execrated, and should be lynched on the spot were I to own my act. I now whipped back to Dr. Amboyne with the theory thus obtained, and compared it with that face; the two fitted each other, and I saw the criminal before me."

"Good heavens! This is very deep."

"No slop-basin was ever deeper. So leave it for the present, and go to work. Here are cards admitting you, as my commissioner, to all the principal works. Begin with---- Stop a moment, while I put myself in your place. Let me see, 'Cheetham's grinders think they have turned me out of Hillsborough. That mortifies a young man of merit like me. Confound 'em! I should like to show them they have not the power to drive me out. Combine how they will, I rise superior. I forge as they could not forge: that was my real crime. Well, I'll be their superior still. I'm their inspector, and their benefactor, at higher wages than they, poor devils, will ever earn at inspecting and benefiting, or any thing else.' Ah! your color rises. I've hit the right nail, isn't it an excellent and most transmigratory art? Then begin with Cheetham. By-the-bye, the Anomaly has spotted a defective grindstone there. Scrutinize all his departments severely; for no man values his people's lives less than my good friend John Cheetham. Away with you both; and God speed you."

Henry walked down the street with the Anomaly, and tried to gauge his intellects.

"What's your real name, my man?"

"Silly Billy."

"Oh, then I'm afraid you can't do much to help me."

"Oh yes, I can, because----"

"Because what?"

"Because I like you."

"Well, that's lucky, any way."

"Billy can catch trout when nobody else can," said the youngster, turning his eyes proudly up to Henry's.

"Oh, indeed! But you see that is not exactly what the doctor wants us for."

"Nay; he's wrapped up in trout. If it wasn't for Billy and the trout, he'd die right off."

Henry turned a look of silent pity on the boy, and left him in his pleasing illusion. He wondered that Dr. Amboyne should have tacked this biped on to him.

They entered Cheetham's works, and Henry marched grimly into the office, and showed Mr. Bayne his credentials.

"Why, Little, you had no need of that."

"Oh, it is as well to have no misunderstanding with your employer's masters. I visit these works for my present employer, Dr. Amboyne, with the consent of Mr. Cheetham, here written."

"Very well, sir," said Bayne, obsequiously; "and I respectfully solicit the honor of conducting our esteemed visitor."

A young man's ill-humor could not stand against this. "Come along, old fellow," said Henry. "I'm a bear, with a sore heart; but who could be such a brute as quarrel with you? Let us begin with the chaps who drove me out--the grinders. I'm hired to philanthropize 'em--d--n 'em."

They went among the dry-grinders first; and Henry made the following observations. The workman's hair and clothes were powdered with grit and dust from the grindstones. The very air was impregnated with it, and soon irritated his own lungs perceptibly. Here was early death, by bronchitis and lung diseases, reduced to a certainty. But he also learned from the men that the quantity of metal ground off was prodigious, and entered their bodies they scarce knew how. A razor-grinder showed him his shirt: it was a deep buff-color. "There, sir," said he, "that was clean on yesterday. All the washerwomen in Hillsbro' can't make a shirt of mine any other color but that." The effect on life, health, and happiness was visible; a single glance revealed rounded shoulders and narrow chests, caused partly by the grinder's position on his horsing, a position very injurious to the organs of breathing, and partly by the two devil's dusts that filled the air; cadaverous faces, the muscles of which betrayed habitual suffering, coughs short and dry, or with a frothy expectoration peculiar to the trade. In answer to questions, many complained of a fearful tightness across the chest, of inability to eat or to digest. One said it took him five minutes to get up the factory stairs, and he had to lean against the wall several times.

A razor-grinder of twenty-two, with death in his face, told Henry he had come into that room when he was eleven. "It soon takes hold of boys," said he. "I've got what I shall never get shut on."

Another, who looked ill, but not dying, received Henry's sympathy with a terrible apathy. "I'm twenty-eight," said he; "and a fork-grinder is an old cock at thirty. I must look to drop off my perch in a year or two, like the rest."

Only one, of all these victims, seemed to trouble his head about whether death and disease could be averted. This one complained that some employers provided fans to drive the dust from the grinder, but Cheetham would not go to the expense.

The rest that Henry spoke to accepted their fate doggedly. They were ready to complain, but not to move a finger in self-defense. Their fathers had been ground out young, and why not they?

Indifferent to life, health, and happiness, they could nevertheless be inflamed about sixpence a week. In other words, the money-price of their labor was every thing to them, the blood-price nothing.

Henry found this out, and it gave him a glimpse into the mind of Amboyne.

He felt quite confused, and began to waver between hate, contempt, and pity. Was it really these poor doomed wretches who had robbed him of his livelihood? Could men so miscalculate the size of things, as to strike because an inoffensive individual was making complete carving-tools all by himself, and yet not strike, nor even stipulate for fans, to carry disease and death away from their own vitals? Why it seemed wasting hate, to bestow it on these blind idiots.

He went on to the wet-grinders, and he found their trade much healthier than dry-grinding: yet there were drawbacks. They suffered from the grit whenever a new stone was hung and raced. They were also subject to a canker of the hands, and to colds, coughs, and inflammations, from perspiration checked by cold draughts and drenched floors. These floors were often of mud, and so the wet stagnated and chilled their feet, while their bodies were very hot. Excellent recipe for filling graves.

Here Bayne retired to his books, and Henry proceeded to the saw-grinders, and entered their rooms with no little interest, for they were an envied trade. They had been for many years governed by Grotait, than whom no man in England saw clearer; though such men as Amboyne saw further. Grotait, by a system of Machiavellian policy, ingeniously devised and carried out, nobly, basely, craftily, forcibly, benevolently, ruthlessly, whichever way best suited the particular occasion, had built a model Union; and still, with unremitting zeal and vigilance, contrived to keep numbers down and prices up--which is the great Union problem.

The work was hard, but it was done in a position favorable to the lungs, and the men were healthy, brawny fellows; one or two were of remarkable stature.

Up to this moment Silly Billy had fully justified that title. He had stuck to Henry's side like a dog, but with no more interest in the inquiry than a calf, indeed, his wandering eye and vacant face had indicated that his scanty wits were wool-gathering miles from the place that contained his body.

But, as soon as he entered the saw-grinders' room, his features lighted up, and his eye kindled. He now took up a commanding position in the center, and appeared to be listening keenly. And he had not listened many seconds before he cried out, "There's the bad music! there! there!" And he pointed to a grindstone that was turning and doing its work exactly like the others. "Oh, the bad music!" cried Billy. "It is out of tune. It says, 'Murder! murder! Out of tune!'"

Henry thought it his duty to inspect the grindstone so vigorously denounced, and, naturally enough, went in front of the grinder. But Billy pulled him violently to the side. "You musn't stand there," said he. "That is the way they fly when they break, and kill the poor father, and then the mother lets down her hair, and the boy goes crazed."

By this time the men were attracted by the Anomaly's gestures and exclamations, and several left their work, and came round him. "What is amiss, Billy? a flawed stone, eh? which is it?"

"Here! here!" said the boy. "This is the wheel of death. Kill it, break it, smash it, before it kills another father."

Henry spoke to the grinder, and asked him if there was anything amiss with the stone.

The man seemed singularly uneasy at being spoken to: however he made answer sullenly that he had seen better ones, and worse ones, and all.

Henry was, however, aware, that the breaking of a large grindstone, while revolving by steam power, was a serious, and often a fatal thing; he therefore made a private mark upon the wall opposite the grindstone, and took his excited companion to Bayne. "This poor lad says he has found a defective grindstone. It is impossible for me to test it while it is running. Will you let us into the works when the saw-grinders have left?"

Bayne hem'd and haw'd a little, but consented. He would remain behind half an-hour to oblige Little.

Henry gave the Anomaly his dinner, and then inspected the file-cutters in two great works. Here he found suicide reduced to a system. Whereof anon.

Returning, to keep his appointment with Bayne he met a well-dressed man, who stopped Billy, and accosted him kindly.

Henry strolled on.

He heard their voices behind him all the way, and the man stopped at Cheetham's gate, which rather surprised him. "Has Billy told you what we are at?" said he.

"Yes. But the very look of him was enough. I know Billy and his ways, better than you do."

"Very likely. What, are you coming in with us?"

"If you have no objection."

The door was opened by Bayne in person. He started at the sight of the companion his friend had picked up, and asked him, with marked civility, if there was anything amiss. "Not that I know of," was the reply. "I merely thought that my experience might be of some little service to you in an inquiry of this kind."

"Not a doubt of it, sir," said Bayne, and led the way with his lantern, for it was past sunset. On the road, the visitor asked if anybody had marked the accused stone. Henry said he should know it again. "That is right," said the other.

On entering the room, this personage took Billy by the arm, and held him. "Let us have no false alarms," he said, and blindfolded the boy with his handkerchief in a moment.

And now an examination commenced, which the time and the place rendered curious and striking.

It was a long, lofty room; the back part mainly occupied by the drums that were turned by the driving-power. The power was on the floor above, and acted by means of huge bands that came down through holes in the ceiling and turned the drums. From each of these drums came two leather bands, each of which turned a pulley-wheel, and each pulley-wheel a grindstone, to whose axle it was attached; but now the grindstones rested in the troughs, and the great wheel-bands hung limp, and the other bands lay along loose and serpentine. In the dim light of a single lamp, it all looked like a gigantic polypus with its limbs extended lazily, and its fingers holding semi-circular claws: for of the grindstones less than half is visible.

Billy was a timid creature, and this blindfolding business rather scared him: he had almost to be dragged within reach of these gaunt antennæ. But each time they got him to touch a grindstone, his body changed its character from shrinking and doubtful, to erect and energetic, and he applied his test. This boy carried with him, night and day, a little wooden hammer, like an auctioneer's, and with this he now tapped each stone several times, searching for the one he had denounced: and, at each experiment, he begged the others to keep away from him and leave him alone with the subject of his experiment; which they did, and held up the lamp and threw the light on him.

Six heavy grindstones he tapped, and approved, three he even praised and called "good music."

The seventh he struck twice, first gently, then hard and drew back from it, screaming "Oh, the bad music! Oh, the wheel of death!" and tried to tear the handkerchief from his eyes.

"Be quiet, Billy," said the visitor, calmly; and, putting his arm round the boy's neck, drew him to his side, and detached the handkerchief, all in a certain paternal way that seemed to betoken a kindly disposition. But, whilst he was doing this, he said to Henry, "Now--you marked a stone in daylight; which was it?"

"No, no, I didn't mark the stone, but I wrote on the wall just opposite. Lend us the light, Bayne. By George! here is my mark right opposite this stone."

"Then Billy's right. Well done, Billy." He put his hand in his pocket and gave him a new shilling. He then inquired of Bayne, with the air of a pupil seeking advice from a master, whether this discovery ought not to be acted upon.

"What would you suggest, sir?" asked Bayne, with equal deference.

"Oh, if I was sure I should not be considered presumptuous in offering my advice, I would say, Turn the stone into the yard, and bang a new one. You have got three excellent ones outside--from Buckhurst quarry, by the look of them."

"It shall be done, sir."

This effective co-operation, on the part of a stranger, was naturally gratifying to Henry, and he said to him: "I should be glad to ask you a question. You seem to know a good deal about this trade----"

A low chuckle burst out of Bayne, but he instantly suppressed it, for fear of giving offense--

"Are serious accidents really common with these grindstones?"

"No, no," said Bayne, "not common. Heaven forbid."

"They are not common--in the newspapers," replied the other. "But" (to Bayne), "will you permit me to light these two gaslights for a moment?"

"Well, sir, it is contrary to our rules,--but----"

"All the more obliging of you," said the visitor, coolly, and lighted them, with his own match, in a twinkling. He then drew out of his waistcoat pocket a double eyeglass, gold-mounted, and examining the ceiling with it, soon directed Henry's attention to two deep dents and a brown splash. "Every one of those marks," said he, "is a history, and was written by a flying grindstone. Where you see the dents the stone struck the ceiling;" he added very gravely, "and, when it came down again, ask yourself, did it always fall right? These histories are written only on the ceiling and the walls. The floor could tell its tales too; but a crushed workman is soon swept off it, and the wheels go on again."

"That is too true," said Henry. "And it does a chap's heart good to hear a gentleman like you----"

"I'm not a gentleman. I'm an old Saw."

"Excuse me, sir, you look like a gentleman, and talk like one."

"And I try to conduct myself like one: but I am an old Saw."

"What! and carry a gold eyeglass?"

"The Trade gave it me. I'm an old Saw."

"Well, then, all the better, for you can tell me, and please do: have you ever actually known fatal accidents from this cause?"

"I have known the light grinders very much shaken by a breaking stone, and away from work a month after it. And, working among saw-grinders, who use heavy stones, and stand over them in working, I've seen---- Billy, go and look at thy shilling, in the yard, and see which is brightest, it or the moon. Is he gone? I've seen three men die within a few yards of me. One, the stone flew in two pieces; a fragment, weighing about four hundredweight I should say, struck him on the breast, and killed him on place; he never spoke. I've forgotten his very name. Another; the stone went clean out of window, but it kicked the grinder backward among the machinery, and his head was crushed like an eggshell. But the worst of all was poor Billy's father. He had been warned against his stone; but he said he would run it out. Well, his little boy, that is Billy, had just brought him in his tea, and was standing beside him, when the stone went like a pistol-shot, and snapped the horsing chains like a thread; a piece struck the wall, and did no harm, only made a hole; but the bigger half went clean up to the ceiling, and then fell plump down again; the grinder he was knocked stupid like, and had fallen forward on his broken horsing; the grindstone fell right on him, and, ah, --I saw the son covered with the father's blood."

He shuddered visibly, at the recollection. "Ay," said he, "the man a corpse, and the lad an idiot. One faulty stone did that, within four yards of me, in a moment of time."

"Good heavens!"

"I was grinding at the next stone but one. He was taken, and I was left. It might just as well have been the other way. No saw-grinder can make sure, when he gets on his horsing, that he will come off it alive."

The visitor left Henry to think of this while he drew Bayne aside, and spoke on another matter.

Afterward, all three left the works together; and Henry was so pleased with his new ally, that he told him, at the gate, he should be glad if he might be allowed to make his acquaintance.

"By all means," said the other. "I am quite at your service. You will find me at the 'Cutlers' Arms.'"

"Who shall I ask for?"

"George Grotait."

"Grotait. The devil!"

"No, no. Not quite so bad as that."

"What," said Henry, roughly, "do you mean to say you are old Smitem?"

"That is a name fools give me."

Henry had no reply ready, and so the sturdy old secretary got the better of him again, and went his way unruffled.

Henry scolded Bayne for not telling him. Bayne excused himself on the ground that he thought everybody knew Grotait. He added, "He knew you, and told me if he could serve you, without being unjust to the Trades, I was to tell him."

Henry replied to this only by a snort of defiance, and bade him good-night.

The next day and the next were spent in other works, and then Henry, having no more facts to learn, fell into deep dejection again. He saw he must either cheat Dr. Amboyne, by shamming work, or else must leave Hillsborough.

He had the honesty to go to the doctor and say that he had mastered the whole matter, and didn't see his way to take any more wages from a friend.

"You mean you have mastered the broad facts."

"I have, sir, and they are beyond belief; especially the file-cutters. They are the most numerous of all the Trades, and die like sheep. If your notion about Life, Labor, and Capital is right, the Trades are upside down; for the deadliest are the worst paid."

"And are you prepared with the remedies?"

"Not I."

"Yet you fancy you are at the end of your work. Why, you are only beginning. Now comes the real brain work; invention. Now are craniology and you upon your trial. But you are quite right about weekly salary. Invention must not be so degraded, but paid by the piece. Life, Labor, and Capital are upside down in this place, are they? Then you shall be the man to set them on their legs."

Henry shook his head. "Never, sir, unless I could give the masters bowels, and the men brains."

"Well, and why not? To invention all things are possible. You carry a note-book?"

"Yes, sir."

"Got it in your pocket?"

"No; on my shoulders."

"Haw! haw! haw! Then write this down in it--'THERE'S A KEY TO EVERY LOCK' "

"It's down, sir."

"Now you must go out trout-fishing with Billy. He will take you on the hills, where the air is pure, and favorable to invention. You will divert your mind from all external subjects, especially Billy, who is a fool, and his trout-killing inhumane, and I a merciless glutton for eating them; and you will think, and think, and think, and forge the required key to this lock with three wards--Life, Labor, Capital. And, when forged, the Philanthropic Society shall pay you a good price for it. Meantime, don't dream of leaving Hillsborough, or I shall give you a stirrup-cup that will waft you much further than London; for it shall be 'of prussic acid all composed,' or 'juice of cursed Hebenon in a vial.' Come, away with you."

"Good-bye, doctor. God bless you. You have found 'the key to my heart' somehow. I come to you a miserable broken-hearted dog, and you put life and hope into me directly. I declare talking with you it's like drinking sunshine. I'll try all I know to please you."

He went down the street with his old elastic tread, and muttered to himself, "There's no lock without a key."

Next day he went out on the hills with Billy, and saw him tickle trout, and catch them under stones, and do many strange things, and all the time he thought of Grace Carden, and bemoaned his sad fate. He could not command his mind, and direct it to philanthropy. His heart would not let him, and his personal wrongs were too recent. After a short struggle, these got so thoroughly the better, that he found himself stealing the doctor's words for his own purposes. "No lock without a key." Then there must be some way of outwitting these cursed Trades, and so making money enough to set up as a master, and then court her, and woo her, and marry her. Heaven seemed to open on him at this prospect, and he fell into a deep reverie. By-and-by, as he pondered, it seemed to him as if the shadow of a coming idea was projected in advance of the idea itself. He knew somehow there was a way to baffle his enemies, and resume his business, and yet he could not see the way; but still he was absolutely conscious it existed.

This conviction took such hold of him, that he became restless, and asked Billy to leave off and come away. The youth consented, and they returned to the town with a basket of trout. Henry sent Billy on to the doctor with half of them, and took the other half to his friend Bayne.

On what a trifle things turn. Bayne was very much pleased with his little attention, and asked him to take them to his lodging, and beg the landlady to cook them for dinner. "Tell her you dine with me, old fellow."

"Oh, hang it, I wasn't fishing for a dinner."

"As if I didn't know that. But you must. Then I shall enjoy your company in peace. I shall be there in an hour."

And so he was: but in that one hour events had occurred that I shall leave Mr. Bayne to relate.

During dinner neither of the friends wasted much time in talk; but after dinner, Bayne produced a bottle of port, notwithstanding Henry's remonstrances at being treated like a stranger, and it soon became apparent that the host himself was not in the habit of drinking that generous mixture every day. At the second glass he so far forgot himself as to utter the phrase "Eternal friendship," and, soon after, he began to writhe in his chair, and, at last, could no longer refrain himself, but told Henry that Miss Carden had been canvassing customers. She had just sent in six orders for sets of carving-tools, all for friends of her own.

Henry colored to the temples at this unexpected proof that she he loved thought of him too.

"Oh, Bayne," cried the poor young man, almost choking, "I little thought--God bless her!"

"Let us drink her health," said Bayne, excitedly.

"Ah, that I will!" and this was the first glass Henry drank honestly.

"Now, Little, I'm not doing quite right, you know; but I must tell you. When we lost you--you know that set of tools the Union dropped in our yard--well, he sent them to London for yours."

"That is just like him," said Henry, bitterly.

"And I'll tell you a good joke; they were in the place when you called, only not unpacked till just before I came away. Returned, sir! with a severe reprimand. 'Wonder you should send us such things as these for carving-tools by Little. If the error is not repaired shall consider ourselves at liberty to communicate direct with that workman.' A regular sugar-plum."

"Oh, thank you, my kind friend, for telling me. The world isn't all bitterness, after all: a poor fellow gets a sweet drop of friendship now and then."

"Yes, and a good drop of port now and then, though I say it that shouldn't. Fill up. Well, my boy, Cheetham is in a fine way. I left him walking about the office like a hyena. So now is your time. You can't fight the Trades; but, if Cheetham will go in with you, and I know he will, for he is sorer than you are, you can trick the Trades yet."

"Ah! tell me how, that is all."

"Oh, I can't tell you exactly. I'll try, though. I say, what a glorious thing the Ruby is: it inspires us, and fires us, et cetera, and gives us ideas beyond our sphere. Did you ever see one of these new portable forges?"

"No; never heard of them."

"No wonder; they are just out. Well, buy one of them--they were invented here--and carry it to some dismal cavern, where the foot of man never treads: make Cheetham grind your blades in another county: and who will ever know? Go to him, and don't say a word, but just ask him for your month's salary. Then he will open the door of business himself--safe. I'll drink his health. He's not a bad sort, Cheetham: only he'd sell his soul for money. I hate such rubbish. Here's 'Perdition to the lot; and no heel-taps.'"

These words of fire set Henry pondering deeply; and, as he pondered, Bayne stuck to the port, and so effectually, that, at last, after an interval of silence, he came out in a new character. He disturbed his companion's reverie by informing him, in a loud, aggressive tone, that it had long been his secret wish to encounter the Hillsborough Trades, in the persons of their secretaries, under the following conditions: a twenty-four feet ring, an experienced referee, and a kingdom looking on. As to the order of the pugilistic events, he was not unreasonably fastidious; must stipulate to begin with old Smitem; but, after that, they might encounter their fate in any order they chose, one down t'other come on. He let him know that this ardent desire for single combats, in an interminable series, arose from their treatment of his friend-- "the best friend--the best heart--oh!--the best company--oh! oh!-- the best--oh! oh! oh!" Whereupon he wept, the bellicose Bayne. And, after weeping the usual quantity, he twaddled, and, after twaddling, he became as pacific as ever, for he went to sleep in his chair.

And, while he snoozed, the words he had uttered set his friend's brain boiling and bubbling.

When the time came at which Bayne ought to return to the works, Henry called the landlady, and said, "Mr. Bayne is not very well. I am going to make his excuses. I wouldn't disturb him till five, if I was you, and then I'd give him a strong cup of tea."

Henry then went direct to the office, and found Mr. Cheetham there.

"Well?" said Mr. Cheetham, rather surlily.

"I am come to ask for my month, sir."

"So I guessed. Do you really mean to exact that?"

"Why not, sir?"

"Haven't you heard how they ground me down?"

"Yes, sir. But why did you give in? I was true to you, but you failed me. I'd have shut up the works for three months, rather than be made a slave of, and go from my word."

"Ay, ay; that's bachelor's talk. I've got a wife and children, and they make a man a mouse."

"Well, sir, I forgive you: but as to my month's wages--now all I say is--PUT YOURSELF IN MY PLACE!"

"Well?"

"You are me. You are brought from London, under an agreement, a month's notice on either side. You work, and give satisfaction. You are threatened, but you don't run from your employer. You are blown up, and nearly killed. You lose a fortnight, but you don't charge for it; 'twasn't your employer's fault. You come back to him, and face the music again. You work with the sword hanging over you. But your employer gives in, and sacks you in a minute. Oughtn't you to have your month? Come now, man to man, oughtn't you?"

"I ought, and that's the truth. I didn't look at it that way. I saw my own side. There--no more about it--I'll draw the check--with a good heart."

He drew his check-book to him, with a face as if vultures were tearing his vitals.

When Henry found him Amboynable, and saw his piteous look, he felt a little softened toward him, and he said, very impressively, "Wait one moment, sir, I've got an idea. I'm not the sort that likes to be beat. Are you?" The men looked steadily at each other.

Cheetham lowered his voice. "I've had hell inside me ever since. I thought I was a man, but they made a mouse of me. If you know any way to beat them, I'll go in with you."

"Well, sir, there is a key to every lock."

"That is well said, and I believe it; but one can't always find the key."

"I almost think I have, sir."

"See nobody is listening. Where is Bayne? He is due."

"Oh, he is not very well, sir; and I was to ask you for an hour's absence."

"Let him have the whole afternoon. I'll not have a soul in this but us two. Now come close, and tell me."

They sat opposite each other, and put their heads together over the table, and the following dialogue passed almost in a whisper. To see them, you would have thought they were conspiring against the law, instead of combining to hide a lawful act from the violaters of the law.

"I can forge the blades a dozen miles from Hillsborough."

"Not you; you will be told of. That won't do."

"I shall not be told of; for nobody will know but you. I shall only forge at night; and the building is out of the world, and wedged in, out of sight, between two bleak hills. Sir, it is a deserted church."

"What, forge blades in a church?"

"A deserted church; why not?"

"Little, you are A 1. Go on."

"I can get the blades ground by a friend at Birmingham; and my mother and I can put them together at home. The complete articles will come to you in parcels of a certain colored paper, invoiced in cipher outside, so that they need not be opened; you can trust the invoice, and dispatch them to your London agent."

"All right."

"The steel you must supply me at the current price, and charge it against me."

"Certainly. But your price per gross? For this work can't be done by time."

"Of course not." And Henry named a price per gross at which Cheetham lifted up his hands. "Why, you'll take nine pounds a week at that!"

"Ay, and more," said Henry, coolly. "But I sha'n't make it. Why, this scheme entails no end of expenses. A house, and stables with back entrance. A swift horse, to gallop to the forge at sunset, and back by noon. A cart to take the things to the railway and back, and to the parcel delivery for you. And, besides that, I must risk my neck, riding over broken ground at night: and working night and day shortens life. You can't reduce these things to Labor and Capital. It's Life, Labor, and Capital."

"Hallo! There's a new cry. I tell ye what; you know too much for me. You read the Beehive. I take you at your price."

Then he had a misgiving. "That old Smitem's as crafty as a fox. If he finds you stay here, with no visible employment, he will soon be down on us."

"Ay; but in the day-time I shall appear as a carver of wood, and also an inspector of factories for Dr. Amboyne. Who will suspect me of a night trade, as well as two day trades?"

Cheetham slapped the table triumphantly: but, recovering his caution, he whispered, "It's planned first-rate."

"And now, sir, there is one difficulty you must help me in, if you please. It is to set up the forge unobserved."

"What, am I to find the forge?"

"There's a question, sir! Of course you are. One of these new portable forges."

Cheetham reflected for some little time. He then said it was a ticklish thing, and he saw but one way. "The forge must come here, after closing hours, and you and I must fetch it away in the dead of night, and take it down to the old church, and set it up."

"Well, but, sir, we shall want assistance."

"Nay, nay. I've got the last suit of moleskin I ever worked in laid away. I'll air 'em, and put 'em on again; and, when I've got em on once more, I shall feel a man again. I'll have neither fool nor spy in it: the thing is too serious. I might bring some country fellow, that can't read or write; but no, these portables are small things, and I'm one of the strongest men in Hillsborough. Best keep it to ourselves. When is it to be?"

"Say next Wednesday, two hours after midnight."

"Then that is settled. And now I'll square the old account agreed." He drew his check-book toward him again.

But Henry slopped him. "Fair play's a jewel," said he smiling. "The moment you sacked me----"

"Say the Trades, not me."

"Dr. Amboyne hired me, at six guineas a week, to inspect the works. So you owe me nothing; but to be true to me."

This trait, though it was one of simple probity, astonished and gratified Mr. Cheetham. He looked on the young man with marked respect. "You are hard; but you are very square. I'll be true as steel to you, and we'll outwit our tyrants together, till I get a chance to put my foot on them. Yes, I'll be open with you; there are plenty of orders from London and the Continent, and one for six sets from swells in Hillsborough."

"Might I see that order?"

"Why not? There, run your eye over it. I want to go into the packing-room for a minute."

He then tossed Henry the order, as if it was nothing more than an order.

But it was a great deal more than that to Henry. It was Grace Carden's handwriting, the first specimen he had ever seen.

He took the paper in his hand, and a slight perfume came from it that went to his heart. He devoured the delicately formed letters, and they went to his heart too: he thrilled all over. And the words were as like her as the perfume. She gave the order, and the addresses of her friends, with a pretty little attempt at the businesslike; but, this done, she burst out, "and we all entreat you to be good to poor Mr. Little, and protect him against the wicked, cruel, abominable Unions."

These sweet words made his heart beat violently, and brought the tears of tenderness into his eyes. He kissed the words again and again. He put them into his bosom, and took them out again, and gloated over them till they danced before his manly eyes. Then his love took another turn: he started up, and marched and strutted, like a young stag, about the room, with one hand pressing the paper to his bosom. Why had he said Wednesday? It could all have been got ready on Tuesday. No matter, he would make up for that lost day. He was on the road, once more, the road to fortune, and to her.

Cheetham came in, and found him walking excitedly, with the paper in his hand, and of course took the vulgar view of his emotion.

"Ay, lad," said he, "and they are all swells, I promise you. There's Miss Laura Craske. That's the mayor's daughter. Lady Betty Tyrone. She's a visitor. Miss Castleton! Her father is the county member."

"And who is this Mr. Coventry?" asked Henry.

"Oh, he is a landed gentleman, but spends his tin in Hillsborough; and you can't blame him. Mr. Coventry? Why, that is Miss Carden's intended."

"Her intended!" gasped Henry.

"I mean her beau. The gentleman she is going to marry, they say."

Henry Little turned cold, and a tremor ran through him; but he did not speak a word; and, with Spartan fortitude, suppressed all outward sign of emotion. He laid the paper down patiently, and went slowly away.

Loyal to his friend even in this bitter moment, he called at Bayne's place and left word with the landlady that Mr. Bayne was not wanted at the works any more that day.

But he could not bear to talk to Bayne about his plans. They had lost their relish. He walked listlessly away, and thought it all over.

For the first time he saw his infatuation clearly. Was ever folly like his? If she had been a girl in humble life, would he not have asked whether she had a sweetheart? Yet he must go and give his heart to a lady without inquiry. There, where wisdom and prudence were most needed, he had speculated like an idiot. He saw it, and said to himself, "I have acted like a boy playing at pitch-farthing, not like a man who knew the value of his heart."

And so he passed a miserable time, bemoaning the treasure that was now quite inaccessible instead of nearly, and the treasure of his own heart he had thrown away.

He awoke with a sense of misery and deep depression, and could not eat; and that was a novelty in his young and healthy life. He drank a cup of tea, however, and then went out, to avoid his mother's tender looks of anxious inquiry. He meant to tell her all one day; but to-day he was not strong enough. He must wait till he was cured; for cured he must be, cured he would be.

He now tried to give his mind to the task Amboyne had set him; but it was too hard: he gave it up, with rage and despair.

Then he made a desperate resolve, which will not surprise those who know the human heart. He would harden himself. He would see more of Miss Carden than ever; only it should be in quite a new light. He would look at her, and keep saying to himself all the time, "You are another man's wife."

With this determination, he called at "Woodbine Villa."

Miss Carden was not at home.

"Are you sure she is not at home?"

"Not at home," replied the man stiffly.

"But you needn't to keep him at the door," said a mellow female voice.

"No, miss," said the man, with a sudden change of manner, for he was a desperate and forlorn admirer of the last speaker. "Come in, sir." And he ushered him in to Jael Dence. She was in her bonnet, and just going out. They shook hands, and she told him Miss Carden was out walking.

"Walking with her beau?" said Henry, affecting a jaunty air, but sick within.

"That's more than I can say," replied Jael.

"You know nothing about it, of course," said Henry, roughly.

Jael looked surprised at the uncalled-for tone, and turned a mild glance of inquiry and reproach upon him.

The young man was ashamed of himself, and at that moment, too, he remembered he had already been rather ungrateful to her. So, to make amends, he said, "Didn't I promise to take you to Cairnhope?"

"Ay," said Jael; and she beamed and blushed in a moment.

"Well, I must go there, Sunday at the latest. So I will come for you, if you like. Will you be ready at ten o'clock?"

"Yes."

"I'll bring a gig, and take you like a lady."

"Anyway you please. I'd as lieve walk as ride."

"I prefer riding. Ten o'clock, the day after to-morrow. Good-bye."

And he hurried away, provoked, not pleased, at the manifest pleasure he had given. The woman he loved--inaccessible! The woman he only liked--he could spend the whole day with her. So the reasonable youth was cross with her for that, and for being so pleased, when he was wretched.

That feeling soon wore off, however, and, being a man of business, he wrote a line to Martha Dence, and told her he should visit her on Sunday. He added, with a gleam of good-humor, "and look out, for I shall bring my lass," intending to give them all an agreeable surprise; for Jael, he knew, was an immense favorite.

Next day he went on the hills with Billy, and, instead of thinking for the benefit of his enemies, as agreed with Amboyne, he set himself to hate every body, especially Miss Carden's lover, and the Hillsborough Unions. The grinders and file-cutters might die like sheep. What did he care? As much as they cared for him. Dr. Amboyne was too good for this world, and should keep his money to himself. He (Henry Little) would earn none of it, would take none of it. What invention he had should all go to outwit the Trades, and turn that old ruffian's church into his own smithy. This double master-stroke, by which he was to defeat one enemy, and secretly affront another, did make him chuckle one or twice, not with joy, but with bitterness.

He awoke in a similar mood next morning: but there was eight o'clock service near, and the silver-toned bell awakened better thoughts. He dressed hurriedly, and went to church.

He came back sadder, but rather less hot, less bitter: he had his breakfast, improved his toilet, went to the livery stable, and drove to "Woodbine Villa."

Mr. and Miss Carden had just finished breakfast, when he drove up to the door.

"Who is this?" said Mr. Carden.

"What, have you forgotten Mr. Little?"

"Indeed! Why, how he is dressed. I took him for a gentleman."

"You were not very far wrong, papa. He is a gentleman at heart."

Jael came in equipped for the ride. She was neatly dressed, and had a plain shepherd's-plaid shawl, that suited her noble bust. She looked a picture of health and happiness.

"If you please, miss, he is come to take me to Cairnhope."

"Oh! is it for that? And I declare you expected him, too."

"Yes," said Jael, and blushed.

"You never told me," said Grace, with a light touch of asperity.

"I didn't feel very sure he would keep his word."

"Then you don't know him as well as I do."

"I haven't the chance. He speaks a deal more to you than he do to me."

"Well, Jael, you needn't snub me, because you are going with Mr. Little."

As a bone, put between two friendly dogs, causes a growl, so when a handsome young man enters on the scene, I have seen young women lose a little of that unmitigated sweetness which marked them a moment before.

With Grace, however, to snap and to repent generally followed in a breath. "I hope you will have a happy day, dear, as happy as you deserve." She then went to kiss her, but gave her cheek, instead of her lips. "There," said she, in rather a flurried way, "don't keep Mr. Little waiting."

Just as they drove off, Grace came to the window, after a slight irresolution, and kissed her hand to them enchantingly; at which a sudden flood of rapture rushed through Little's heart, and flushed his cheek, and fired his dark eye; Grace caught its flash full in hers, and instinctively retired a step. They were off.

"How bright and happy they look," said she to her father. And no wonder.

She sat down, and, somehow, she felt singularly dull and lonely.

Then she dressed for church, languidly. Then she went to church. By-and-by she came back from church.

Then she sat down, in her bonnet, and felt alone in the world, and sad; and at last she found herself quietly crying, as young ladies will sometimes, without any visible cause.

Then she asked herself what on earth she was crying about, and herself told her she was a little hysterical fool, and wanted a good beating.

Then she plucked up spirit, and dried her eyes. Then she took to yawning, and said Sunday was a dull day, and life itself rather a wearisome thing.

Then a servant came to inquire if she was at home.

"What, on Sunday? Of course not. Who is it?"

"Mr. Coventry, miss."

"I am at home."

People that met Jael Dence and Henry Little driving to Cairnhope were struck with their faces; his so dark, hers so fair, and both so handsome: but the woman's lit up with lively delight, the man's clouded and sorrowful, and his brow knit with care. This very day he must take the lock off Cairnhope old church, in spite of his Uncle Raby. He had got the requisite tools with him hidden in the gig; but, even should he succeed, it was but the first step of a difficult and, perhaps, dangerous enterprise; and he was entering on it all with a heart no longer buoyed by hopeful love. But for his pledge to Mr. Cheetham he could hardly have persisted in the struggle.

As for Jael Dence, she had no great reason to be happy either: the man she loved loved another. Still he was kind to her, and they belonged to the same class; she had a chance, and gleams of hope. And, after all, the future was uncertain, but the present certain: she had him to herself for the day. She was close to him--so close, that she could feel him--and he was driving her out, and to those who loved her: she basked in the present delight, and looked as if she was being taken to heaven by an angel, instead of driving to Cairnhope by a gloomy young man, whom the passers-by envied, and wondered at his good luck in having such a companion. She talked to him, and got the short answers of an absent man. But she continued to make her little remarks occasionally, and, ere they reached Cairnhope, he found himself somehow soothed by her sex, her beauty, and her mellow, kindly voice.

As they drove up to the farm-house, he told her to hide her face a moment, for they didn't know who it was.

Martha ran out. "Y'are welcome, y'are welcome; and so is your---- Eh! Why it's our Jael. 'Tis no avail to hide thy face, thou jade; I know every bit o' thee." And Patty had her out of the gig in a moment, and there was a cuddling match it did one good to see.

Henry perked up for a moment and offered a suggestion. "Some of that ought to come my way, for bringing her here."

"Oh, you'll get enough o' that fun before you die," said Patty. "Now come you in; the carter's boy will take the horse."

They went in and greeted the old farmer; and soon the bell began to ring for church, and Nathan Dence told Martha to put on her bonnet.

"La, father!" said she, piteously.

"She prefers to stay at home and chat with Jael," said Henry. The fact is, he wanted to be rid of them both.

Old Dence shook his head. He was one of those simple, grand, old rustic Christians, who have somehow picked out the marrow of religion, and left the devil the bone, yclept theology. "What?" said he, "my lasses! can't ye spare God a slice out of his own day?"

"Nay, it is not that, father."

The old man continued his remonstrance. "To be sure our Jael is a cordial. But she'll dine and sup with us. Take my word for 't, all lawful pleasures are sweeter on the Lord's day after a bit o' church."

"And so they are, father; but dear heart! to think of you forgetting. Will nobody tell him? They're sworn to give me a red face, Jael and all."

This piteous appeal set Jael's wits working. "Eh, father, it will be the first of her bans!"

"Is it me you are asking such a question?" cried Patty, and turned her head away with absurd mock-modesty.

"And so 'tis," said Dence; "ah, that is a different thing."

Henry thought that was no reason for Patty's staying at home; she ought rather to go and hear the bans were cried all right.

At this proposal both sisters lifted up their hands, and he was remonstrated with, and lectured, and at last informed that, if a girl was in church when her bans were cried, her children would be all born deaf and dumb.

"Oh, indeed!" said Little, satirically. "That's a fact in natural history I was not aware of. Well, farmer, then let's you and I go by ourselves."

So Patty stayed at home, in obedience to rural superstition, and Jael stayed to keep her company, and Farmer Dence went to church out of piety; and as for Henry, to tell the truth, he went to church to escape the girls' tongues, and to be in a quiet, somniferous place, where he could think out his plans undisturbed.

The men were no sooner gone than the sisters began to gossip hard.

"Eh, Jael, thou's gotten a prize."

"Not as I know of."

"I do adore a dark young man."

"So do I; but this one is not mine."

"I'll take his word before thine. Why, he calls thee his lass in his very letter."

"Not he. Show me his letter."

"What will ye give me?"

"Nay, Patty, pray show it me."

"Well, and so I will."

She brought her the letter. Jael read it and changed color, and was delighted for a moment or two; but soon her good sense and humility prevailed. "'Twas to surprise you, like. I do know he looks higher than me."

"More fool he. But I don't believe it."

"You may," said Jael, and turned the conversation to Patty's approaching marriage; once launched in that direction, it flowed without intermission till the men returned, and dinner smoked upon the board.

After dinner Henry watched an opportunity, and slipped out into the yard, got the tools out, put his great-coat over them, and away to Cairnhope Church. He knew better than go past Raby Hall to it: he went back toward Hillsborough, full three miles, and then turned off the road and got on the heather. He skirted the base of a heathery mound, and at last saw the church on an elevation before him, made for it incautiously over some boggy ground, and sank in up to his waist.

He extricated himself with considerable difficulty, and cast a woful look at his clothes.

Then he turned to, and piled up a heap of stones to mark the dangerous spot; for he foresaw he must often travel that way in all weathers. At last he reached the church, removed the lock, and fastened the door with screws. He then went back to the farm as fast as he could. But all this had taken a long time, and the sun was sinking as he got into the yard. He was in the very act of concealing the lock in the gig, when Martha Dence came out at him, as red as a turkey-cock.

"You thought but little of my sister, young man, to leave her all these hours, and you come out to spend the day with her."

"Stuff and nonsense! I came out on my own business."

"So it seems. And it have taken you into worse company. A fine figure she has made you."

"Who?"

"The hussy you have been after this while."

"That's so like you girls. You think a man has nothing to do but to run after women."

"What business can you have on the Sabbath-day, I'd like to know."

"Would you? Well, I'll tell you--when I tell the bellman."

"You are quite right, Mr. Little. Trust none but your friends."

This was a bitter remark. Henry could not reply to it, and that moved his bile. Patty pursued her advantage, and let him know that, when a young man brought a young woman out for the day, he did not leave her for three hours at a stretch, unless he meant to affront her. She raised her voice in saying this, and so did he in replying, "Tell you I came out on my own business, not Jael's; but I am a good-natured fellow, considering all I endure, so I took that opportunity to bring your sister out to see you. Could I guess you two couldn't make yourselves happy for one afternoon without flirting? So much for sisterly affection! Well, next time I'll come alone--if I come at all."

Jael came out at the raised voices, and received this last sentence full in the face. She turned pale.

"Oh, Patty, Patty, what have you been saying?"

"I've been speaking my mind, that is all."

"Ay, and you've made him say the only unkind word I ever heard from his lips."

"I'm very sorry, Jael," said the young man, penitently.

"Oh, then I'm to blame, because he is so ill-tempered." And Patty bridled.

"Partly. You should not interfere between friends." Having delivered this admonition, Jael softened it by kissing her, and whispered, "Father's asking for his tea."

Patty went in as meek as Moses.

Then Jael turned to Henry, and laid her hand on his arm, while her gray eyes searched his face.

"There's something amiss. You are never cross, except when you are unhappy. What is it?"

"Oh, Jael, my heart is broken. She is going to be married."

"Who says so?"

"Mr. Cheetham told me she was engaged to a Mr. Coventry."

"What can Mr. Cheetham know? To be sure the gentleman is a good deal with her, and I hear he has courted her this two years; and she likes his company, that's certain. But she is used to be admired, and she is very hard to please."

"What, then, you think it is not quite hopeless?"

"While there's life there's hope."

"What had I better do?"

"Nay, you shouldn't ask me."

"Oh, yes: you advised me so wisely about the insurance."

"Ay, but then I saw it clear. He is purse-proud, and I knew he'd think a deal more of you if you insured your life for a vast o' money. But now I don't see clear; and I'm loath to advise. Happen you'd hate me afterward if it went wrong."

"No, no, I wouldn't be so ungrateful."

Jael shook her head, doubtfully.

"Well, then," said Henry, "don't advise me; but put yourself in my place. (I'll tell you a secret I daren't trust to Patty. I have found a way to beat the Trades, and make my fortune in a year or two.) Now what would you do, if you were me?"

This question raised a tumult in Jael's heart. But her strong will, her loyalty, and, above all, her patience, conquered, though not without signs of the struggle, a bosom that heaved somewhat higher, and a low voice that trembled a little. "If I was a young man, I wouldn't shilly-shally, nor wait till I was rich, before I spoke. I'd have it out with her. I'd get her alone, and tell her all. Then, if she showed any sign of liking, I'd beg her to wait a bit, and say I'd soon be a gentleman for her sake. And if she cares naught for you, better know it, and leave her, than fare in heaven one hour and in hell the next, as I have seen thee do this while, my poor lad."

"It is wise and good advice, and I'll take it. I've kept all my courage for the Trades; I'd better have shown her a little. But there's one thing more I want to ask you."

This was too much. Jael's courage and patience failed her for once. "Keep it," she cried almost wildly. "I can't bear no more. There's not one lass in a hundred would do what I have done for you: yet you want more. D'ye think I'm not flesh and blood, as well as her?"

And she began to cry bitterly.

This took Henry quite by surprise, and grieved him. He consoled her, and coaxed her, in vague terms, that did not produce any effect. So then he kissed her cheek, and dried her eyes with his own handkerchief, and that was not quite so ineffectual. She gave a final sob, and said, with some slight remains of passion, "There, there; never heed me. It takes a deal of patience to go through the world." And so she left him.

He was not sorry to be alone a minute, and think. This short dialogue with Jael gave him some insight into female character. It made him suspect that he had been too timid with Grace Carden, and also that there were two women in the game instead of one.

When the time came to return he asked leave to borrow a horse-cloth.

He aired it by the fire, and remarked that it had turned very cold.

"Why," said Patty, "you have got your top-coat. Well, you are a soft one."

"And you are a sharp one," said Henry, ironically.

When Jael came to the gig, Henry put the cloth over her shoulders. "'Twasn't for me, ye see," said he: "'twas for my betters."

"I like you for that," said Patty.

Then there was much kissing, and shaking of hands, and promising to come again, and away they drove to Hillsborough.

On the road Henry, for the first time, was very respectful, as well as kind, to Jael. She was soft and gentle, but rather silent and reserved. They parted at the door of "Woodbine Villa."

Next day, Henry called early, and found Miss Carden alone. His heart beat tumultuously. She was very gracious, and hoped he had spent a pleasant day yesterday.

"Pretty well."

"Is that all? Why I quite envied you your ride, and your companion."

"She is a very good girl."

"She is something more than that: but one does not find her out all at once."

Now it was Henry's turn. But he was flustered, and thinking how he should begin. And, while he hesitated, the lady asked him was he come to finish the bust.

"No. I didn't come for that. I will finish it though." And thus he was diverted from his purpose, for the moment.

He took a carving tool, and eyed his model, but soon laid down the tool, and said: "I haven't thanked you yet. And I don't know how to thank you."

"What for?"

"For what you sent to Mr. Cheetham."

"Oh!" said Grace, and blushed. Then she turned it off, and said she thought if any body ought to thank her for that, it was Mr. Cheetham.

"Ay, for the order. But the sweet words that came with it? Do you think I don't prize them above all the orders in the world?"

She colored high again. "What! did he show you my note?"

"He did: and that has made me his friend. Shall I tell you the effect of those words on me?"

"No; never mind. But I'm glad I put them in, if they did you any good."

"Any good? They made me a new man. I was defeated by the Trades: I was broken-hearted: and I hated every body. Good Dr. Amboyne had set me work to do; to save the lives of my fellow-creatures. But I couldn't; I hated them so. The world had been too unjust to me, I could not return it good for evil. My heart was full of rage and bitterness."

"That's a great pity--at your age. But really it is no wonder. Yes; you have been cruelly used." And the water stood in Grace's eyes.

"Ay, but it is all over; those sweet words of yours made a man of me again. They showed me you cared a little for me. Now I have found a way to outwit the Trades. Now I'm on the road to fortune. I won't be a workman this time next year. I'll be a master, and a thriving one."

"Ay, do, do. Beat them, defeat them; make them scream with envy. But I am afraid you are too sanguine."

"No; I can do it, if you will only give me another word of hope to keep me going; and oh, I need it, if you knew all."

Grace began to look uneasy. "Mr. Little, can you doubt that you have my best wishes?" said she, guardedly, and much less warmly than she had spoken just before.

"No, I don't doubt that; but what I fear is, that, when I have gained the hard battle, and risen in the world, it will be too late. Too late."

Grace turned more and more uncomfortable.

"Oh, pray wait a few months, and see what I can do, before you----"

Will it be believed that Mr. Carden, who seldom came into this room at all, must walk in just at this moment, and interrupt them. He was too occupied with his own affairs, to pay much attention to their faces, or perhaps he might have asked himself why the young man was so pale, and his daughter so red.

"I heard you were here, Little, and I want to speak to you on a matter of some importance."

Grace took this opportunity, and made her escape from the room promptly.

Henry, burning inwardly, had to listen politely to a matter he thought pitiably unimportant compared with that which had been broken off. But the "Gosshawk" had got him in its clutches; and was resolved to make him a decoy duck. He was to open a new vein of Insurances. Workmen had hitherto acted with great folly and imprudence in this respect, and he was to cure them, by precept as well as example.

Henry assented, to gratify a person whose good-will he might require, and to get rid of a bore. But that was not so easy; the "Gosshawk" was full of this new project, and had a great deal to say, before he came to the point, and offered Henry a percentage on the yearly premium of every workman that should be insured in the "Gosshawk."

This little bargain struck, Henry was left alone; and waited for the return of Miss Carden.

He was simple enough to hope she would come back, and have it out with him.

She kept carefully out of his way, and, at last, he went sadly home.

"Ah," said he, "Jael gave me bad advice. I have been premature, and frightened her."

He would go to work his own way again.

In forty-eight hours he moved into his new house, furnished it partly: bought a quantity of mediocre wood-carving, and improved it; put specimens in his window, and painted his name over the door. This, at his mother's request and tearful entreaties, he painted out again, and substituted "Rowbotham."

Nor was Rowbotham a mere nom de plume. It was the real name of Silly Billy. The boy had some turn for carving, but was quite uncultivated: Henry took him into his employ, fed him, and made free with his name. With all this he found time to get a key made to fit the lock of Cairnhope old Church.

At one o'clock on Thursday morning he came to Cheetham's works, and scratched at the gate. A big workman opened it. It turned out to be Cheetham himself, in a moleskin suit, and a long beard.

The forge on wheels was all ready, also a cart containing anvil, bellows, hammers, pincers, leathern buckets, and a quantity of steel laths. They attached the forge to the tail of the cart, and went on their silent expedition. Cheetham drove the cart. Henry followed afar off until they had cleared the suburbs.

They passed "Woodbine Villa." A single light was burning. Henry eyed it wistfully, and loitered long to look at it. Something told him that light was in her bedroom. He could hardly tear himself away from contemplating it: it was his pole-star.

There was only one great difficulty in their way; a man on a horse might cross the moor, but a cart must go by "Raby Hall" to reach the church: and, before they got within a furlong of the Hall, a watch-dog began to bark.

"Stop, sir," whispered Henry. "I expected this." He then produced some pieces of thick felt, and tied them with strings round the wheels.

They then drove by the house as fast as they could. They did not deceive the dogs; but no man heard them, nor saw them.

They got to the church, opened the door, and drew the forge into the deserted building.

As soon as they got inside, Cheetham cast his eyes round and gave a shudder. "You must have a stout heart: no money should tempt me to work here by myself. Lord! What's that?"

For a low musical moan was heard.

Cheetham darted back, and got to the church-door.

Henry's heart beast faster: but he lighted his lantern, and went up the aisle. The place was solemn, grim, gaunt, and moldering, and echoed strangely; but it was empty. He halloed to his companion that it was all right. Then they set the forge up near a pillar at the entrance into the chancel. When they had done this, and brought in the steel laths, the sacks of coals, etc., Cheetham produced a flask, and took a pull of neat brandy. This gave him courage, and he proposed to have a look round before they went. Accordingly they inspected the building.

When they came round to the chancel, suddenly there was a rattle, and a tremendous rush of some huge thing that made a cold wind, and blew out the light.

Henry was appalled, and Cheetham dropped the lantern, and ran, yelling. And soon Henry heard his voice in the churchyard calling on him to come out.

He did go out, and felt very much puzzled and alarmed. However, he got matches from Cheetham, and went back, and lighted the lantern, quaking a little, and then he found that the great moldering picture over the altar had rotted away from some of its supports, and one half of it was now drooping, like a monstrous wing, over the altar.

He returned with the lantern, and told Cheetham what it was. Then he screwed on the lock, locked the church, and they went back to Hillsborough in good spirits.

But, as he lay in bed, Henry thought the matter over, and, for the first time in his life, felt superstitious.

"It is very odd," he said, "that old picture my forefathers have worshiped under, and prayed to, no doubt, should flap out in my face like that, the moment I offered to set up my forge among their dead bones."

Daylight dispersed these superstitious feelings, and the battle began.

As usual, the first step toward making money was to part with it. He could do nothing without a horse and a light cart. In Hillsborough they drive magnificent horses in public cabs: Henry knew one in particular, that had often spun up the steepest hills with him; a brute of prodigious bone and spirit. He bought this animal for a moderate price, considering his value: and then the next thing was--and indeed with some of us it precedes the purchase of the animal--to learn to ride.

He had only two days to acquire this accomplishment in: so he took a compendious method. He went to the circus, at noon, and asked to see the clown. A gloomy fellow was fished out of the nearest public, and inquired what he wanted.

"The clown."

"Well, I am the clown."

"What! you the merry chap that makes the fun?" said Henry, incredulously.

"I make the fun at night," replied the man, dolefully. "If you want fun out of me, come and pay your shilling, like a man."

"But it isn't fun I'm come for. I want to learn to ride."

"Then you are too old. Why, we begin as soon as we can stand on a horse's back."

"Oh, I don't mean to ride standing. I want to sit a horse, rearing, or plunging, or blundering over rough ground."

"What will you stand?"

"A sovereign."

The clown dived into the public-house, and told a dark seedy man, with his black hair plastered and rolled effeminately, that he had got a bloke who would stand a quid for a mount. The two came out, and the plastered Italian went to the stables: the melancholy punster conducted Henry into the arena, and stood beside him like Patience on a monument. Presently a quiet mare ran in, and stuck.

Henry was mounted, and cantered her round, the two men instinctively following in a smaller circle, with jaws as long as your arm.

"This is delightful," said Henry; "but I might as well be sitting in a chair. What I want is a Prancer."

Then they brought him another horse, just as docile as the mare. The obedient creature, at a signal, reared suddenly, and seated Mr. Little on the sawdust behind him. A similar result was attained several times, by various means. But Henry showed himself so tough, courageous, and persistent, that he made great progress, and his good-humor won his preceptors. They invited him to come tomorrow, at an earlier hour, and bring half a quid with him. He did so, and this time there was an American rider rehearsing, who showed Henry what to do, and what not to do; and gave him a most humorous and instructive lesson. Indeed, his imitations of bad riding were so truthful and funny, that even the clown was surprised into one laugh; he who rarely smiled, unless in the way of business.

"Well, sir," said Henry, "you have given me a good lesson; now take a hint from me; just you go and do all this before the public; for I never saw you do any thing half as droll."

They all three shook their heads with one accord. Go out of the beaten track, before an audience? Never. Such vagaries were only admissible in private.

After this second day the fee was reduced to a gallon of ale.

But, on the third day, the pupil combined theory with practice. He told his mother he was going to Cairnhope for the night. He then rode off to Cairnhope Church. He had two large saddle-bags, containing provisions, and tools of all sorts. He got safe across the moor just before sunset. He entered the church, led the horse in with him, and put him into the Squire's pew. He then struck a light, went into the chancel, and looked at the picture. It was as he had left it; half on the wall, half drooping over the altar-place. The walls were dank, and streaked here and there with green. His footsteps echoed, and the edifice was all dark, except within the rays of his lantern; it also sang and moaned in a way to be accounted for by the action of the wind on a number of small apertures; but, nevertheless, it was a most weird and ghostly sound. He was glad of the companionship of his very horse.

He took his buckets to the mountain stream, and, in due course, filled his trough, and left one bucket full for other uses. He then prepared and lighted his forge. As he plied the bellows, and the coals gleamed brighter and brighter, monumental figures came out and glared at him; mutilated inscriptions wavered on the walls; portions of the dark walls themselves gleamed in the full light, and showed the streaks and stains of age and weather, and the shadow of a gigantic horse's head; and, as the illuminated part seemed on fire by contrast, so the dark part of the church was horribly black and mysterious, and a place out of which a ghost or phantom might be expected, at any moment, to come forth into that brilliant patch of light.

Young Little, who had entered on this business in all the skepticism of the nineteenth century, felt awed, and began to wish he had selected any other building in the world but this. He seemed to be desecrating a tomb.

However, he mustered up his manly resolution. He looked up at a small aperture in the roof, and saw a star glittering above: it seemed close, and a type of that omniscient eye "from which no secrets are hid."

He clasped his hands together, and said, "I hope God, who has seen me driven from the haunts of men, will forgive me for taking refuge here; and, if he does, I don't care who else is offended, alive or dead." And, with this, he drew the white-hot strip of steel from the forge on to the anvil, and down came his hammer with a blow that sent the fiery steel flying all round, and rang and echoed through the desolate building, instantly there was a tremendous plunge and clatter, followed by a shaking sound, and, whiz, the church was fanned by black wings going zigzag.

"Ten thousand devils!" yelled Henry, and heaved the hammer high, in his own defense.

But it was only the horse plunging and quivering with fear, and a score of bats the blow of the hammer had frightened out of the rotten pulpit.

He resumed work with a beating heart, and the building rang and echoed and re-echoed with the rapid blows; and no more interruption came. The nineteenth century conquered.

After four hours of earnest work, he fed his horse, ate a slice of bread and meat, drank water from the bucket, gave his horse some, and went to sleep in a pew beside that useful animal.

Back to Hillsborough, at peep of day, with the blades he had forged.

He now took his mother, in a great measure, into his confidence, under a strict promise to tell nobody, not even Dr. Amboyne. Mrs. Little received the communication in a way that both surprised and encouraged him. She was as willing to outwit the Unions, as she was willing to resist them openly; and Henry found her an admirable coadjutor.

Had she known where Henry had set up his forge, she would have been very unhappy. But he merely told her it was in a secluded place, near Cairnhope, where he could never be detected.

The carving business, being merely a blind, was not pushed. But Henry gave his apprentice, Billy, instruction, and the youth began to show an aptitude which contrasted remarkably with his general incapacity.

Mrs. Little paid one or two visits to factories, to see what women could do in this sort of work; and, one day, she told Henry she was sure she could sharpen and finish the blades.

"No, mother," said Henry. "You are a lady. I can't have you made a slave of, and your beautiful white hands spoiled."

"I shall be happier, helping you, dear; and I won't spoil my hands, since you care about them."

She insisted on a trial, and soon acquired a remarkable knack: she had a fine light hand: and it is an art easily learned by an attentive and careful woman. Indeed they can beat the men at it, if they will only make up their minds.

And so the enterprise was launched, and conducted thus: in the day time, Henry showed himself in the town, and talked big about carving; and, in the afternoon, he rode out, and did the real work of his life, over the dead bodies of his ancestors.

His saddle-bags were always full, and, gradually, he collected some comforts about him in the deserted church.

He called, more than once, at "Woodbine Villa," but Miss Carden was on a visit.

He was in the full career of fortune again, and sanguine of success, before they met. One day, having ascertained from Jael what day she would be at home, he called and was admitted. The room was empty, but Miss Carden soon came into it, accompanied by Jael carrying the bust.

"Ah, Mr. Little," said she, before he could possibly utter a word, "this is fortunate. There is a party here on Thursday, and I want to show the bust complete, if you don't mind."

Henry said he would finish it for her. He accordingly set to work, and waited quietly till Jael should leave the room, to have it out with Grace.

She, for her part, seemed to have forgotten his strange manner to her the other day; perhaps she chose to forget it, or overlook it. But Henry observed that Jael was not allowed to quit the room. Whatever Miss Carden wanted she fetched herself, and came back softly, and rather suddenly, as if she had a mind to surprise Jael and the other too. Female subtlety was clearly at work.

"What do you advise me?" said Henry to Jael, during one of these intervals.

Jael never lifted her eyes from her work, and spoke under her breath, "I think I'd be patient to-day. She must give you a chance to speak some day. Talk to me, when she comes back--about the Cairnhope folk, or anything."

Henry followed this advice, and Grace, for the first time, found herself a little ignored in the conversation. She was astonished at this and I don't think she quite liked it.

Henry was still going on with warmth and volubility about the Cairnhope folk, their good hearts, and their superstitions, when a visitor was announced.

"Mr. Coventry."

Henry stopped in the middle of a sentence.

Grace brightened up, and said she was at home.

Mr. Coventry entered the room; a tall, well-made man, with an aquiline nose, and handsome face, only perhaps there were more lines in it than he was entitled to at his age, for he was barely thirty. He greeted Miss Carden with easy grace, and took no more notice of the other two, than if they were chairs and tables.

Mr. Frederick Coventry had studied the great art of pleasing, and had mastered it wonderfully; but he was not the man to waste it indiscriminately.

He was there to please a young lady, to whom he was attached, not to diffuse his sunshine indiscriminately.

He courted her openly, not indelicately, but with a happy air of respect and self-assurance.

Henry sat, sick with jealousy, and tried to work and watch; but he could only watch: his hand trembled too much to work.

What may be called oblique flattery is very pleasing to those quick-witted girls, who have had a surfeit of direct compliments: and it is oblique flattery, when a man is supercilious and distant to others, as well as tender and a little obsequious to her he would please.

Grace Carden enjoyed this oblique flattery of Mr. Coventry's all the more that it came to her just at a moment when her companions seemed disposed to ignore her. She rewarded Mr. Coventry accordingly, and made Henry Little's heart die within him. His agony became intolerable. What a position was his! Set there, with a chisel in his hand, to copy the woman he loved, while another wooed her before his face, and she smiled at his wooing!

At last his chisel fell out of his hand, and startled everybody: and then he rose up with pale cheek, and glittering eyes, and Heaven only knows what he was going to do or say. But at that moment another visitor was announced, to whom indeed the door was never closed. He entered the next moment, and Grace ran to meet him, crying, "Oh, Mr. Raby! this is a surprise."

Mr. Raby kissed her, and shook hands with Mr. Coventry. He then said a kind word to Jael Dence, who got up and courtesied to him. He cast a careless glance on Henry and the bust, but said nothing. He was in a hurry, and soon came to the object of his visit.

"My dear," said he, "the last time I saw you, you said you were sorry that Christmas was no longer kept in Hillsborough as it used to be."

"And so I am."

"Well, it is kept in Cairnhope, thank Heaven, pretty much as it was three centuries ago. Your father will be in London, I hear; will you honor my place and me with a visit during the Christmas holidays?"

Grace opened her eyes with astonishment. "Oh, that I will," said she, warmly.

"You will take your chance of being snowed up?"

"I am afraid I shall not be so fortunate," was the charming reply.

The Squire turned to Coventry, and said slyly, "I would ask you to join us, sir; but it is rather a dull place for a gentleman who keeps such good company."

"I never heard it spoken of as a dull place before," said the young man; "and, if it was, you have taken a sure means to make it attractive."

"That is true. Well, then, I have no scruple in asking you to join us;" and he gave Grace a look, as much as to say, "Am I not a considerate person?"

"I am infinitely obliged to you, Mr. Raby," said Coventry, seriously; "I will come."

"You will stay to luncheon, godpapa?"

"Never touch it. Good-bye. Well, then, Christmas-eve I shall expect you both. Dinner at six. But come an hour or two before it, if you can: and Jael, my girl, you know you must dine at the hall on Christmas-eve, and old Christmas-eve as usual, you and your sister and the old man."

Jael courtesied, and said with homely cordiality, "We shall be there, sir, please God we are alive."

"Bring your gun, Coventry. There's a good sprinkling of pheasants left. By-the-bye, what about that pedigree of yours; does it prove the point?"

"Completely. Dorothy Raby, Sir Richard's youngest sister, married Thomas Coventry, who was out in the forty-five. I'm having the pedigree copied for you, at a stationer's near."

"I should like to see it."

"I'll go with you, and show it to you, if you like."

Mr. Raby was evidently pleased at this attention, and they went off together.

Grace accompanied them to the door. On her return she was startled by the condition of young Little.

This sudden appearance of his uncle, whom he hated, had agitated him not a little, and that uncle's interference had blasted his last hope. He recognized this lover, and had sided with him: was going to shut the pair up, in a country house, together. It was too much. He groaned, and sank back in his chair, almost fainting, and his hands began to shake in the air, as if he was in an ague.

Both the women darted simultaneously toward him. "Oh! he's fainting!" cried Grace. "Wine! wine! Fly." Jael ran out to fetch some, in spite of a despairing gesture, by which the young man tried to convey to her it was no use.

"Wine can do me no good, nor death no harm. Why did I ever enter this house?"

"Oh, Mr. Little, don't look so; don't talk so," said Grace, turning pale, in her turn. "Are you ill? What is the matter?"

"Oh, nothing. What should ail me? I'm only a workman. What business have I with a heart? I loved you dearly. I was working for you, fighting for you, thinking for you, living for you. And you love that Coventry, and never showed it."

Jael came in with a glass of wine for him, but he waved her off with all the grandeur of despair.

"You tell me this to my face!" said Grace, haughtily; but her bosom panted.

"Yes; I tell you so to your face. I love you, with all my soul."

"How dare you? What have I ever done, to justify-- Oh, if you weren't so pale, I'd give you a lesson. What could possess you? It's not my fault, thank heaven. You have insulted me, sir. No; why should I? You must be unhappy enough. There, I'll say but one word, and that, of course, is 'good morning.'"

And she marched out of the room, trembling secretly in every limb.

Henry sat down, and hid his face, and all his frame shook.

Then Jael was all pity. She threw herself on her knees, and kissed his trembling hands with canine fidelity, and wept on his shoulder.

He took her hand, and tried hard to thank her, but the words were choked.

Grace Carden opened the door, and put her head cautiously in, for she wanted to say a word to Jael without attracting Henry's attention. But, when she saw Jael and Henry in so loving an attitude, she started, and then turned as red as fire; and presently burst out laughing.

Jael and Henry separated directly.

Grace laughed again, an unpleasant laugh. "I beg pardon, good people. I only wanted Mr. Little's address. I thought you could get it for me, Jael. And now I'm sure you can. Ha! ha! ha!"

And she was heard laughing after the door closed.

Now there was a world of contempt and insolence in this laugh. It conveyed, as plainly as words, "I was going to be so absurd as to believe in your love, and pity it, at all events, though I can't approve it: but now you have just set my mind at ease. Ha! ha! ha!"

"Let me go," cried Henry, wildly.

"Nay, tell me your address."

"What for? To tell that cruel--laughing--"

"Nay then, for myself."

"That's a different thing. I respect you. But her, I mean to hate, as much as I loved her."

He gave Jael his address, and then got out of the house as fast as he could.

That evening Grace Carden surprised her father, by coming into his study. "Papa," said she, "I am come to ask a favor. You must not refuse me. But I don't know that you ever did. Dearest, I want £50."

"Well, my child; just tell me what it is for."

"It is for Mr. Little; for his lessons."

"Well, but £50!"

"He has given me a good many. And to tell you the truth, papa, I dismissed him rather unceremoniously; and now I should be glad to soften the blow a little, if I can. Do be very good and obedient, dear papa, and write what I shall dictate. Please!"

"Well, spoiled child: who can resist you?"

Then Grace dictated, and Mr. Carden wrote:--

"DEAR SIR,--My daughter informs me that, as yet, you have received no remuneration for the lessons you have given her. I beg your acceptance of the inclosed check, and, at the same time, should be glad if you would put a price on the admirable bust you have executed of her.--Yours obediently,

"WALTER CARDEN."

The reply to this letter surprised Mr. Carden, so that he brought it to Grace, and showed it her.

"DEAR SIR,--The lessons are not worth speaking of. I have learned more in your house than I taught. I beg to return the check with thanks. Price of the bust, five hundred guineas.--Yours obediently,

"HENRY LITTLE."

Grace colored up, and her eyes sparkled. "That young man wants humbling."

"I don't see that, really. He is very civil, and I presume this five hundred guineas is just a polite way of saying that he means to keep it. Wants it for an advertisement, eh?"

Grace smiled and bit her lip. "Oh, what a man of business you are!" And a little while after the tears came into her eyes. "Madman!" said she to herself. "He won't let me be his friend. Well, I can't help it."

After the brief excitement of this correspondence, Little soon relapsed into dull misery. His mother was alarmed, and could restrain herself no longer. She implored his confidence. "Make me the partner of your grief, dear," she said; "not that you can tell me anything I have not guessed already; but, dearest, it will do you good to open your heart; and, who knows, I may assist you. I know my sex much better than you do."

Henry kissed her sadly, and said it was too late now. "It is all over. She is going to marry another man."

"Has she told you so?"

"Not in words; but I have seen it. She has burned it into my heart."

"I wish I knew her," said Mrs. Little, very earnestly, and almost in a whisper.

"Some day, mother, some day; but not now. Oh, the tortures one heart can suffer, and yet not break."

Mrs. Little sighed. "What, not even tell me her name?"

"I can't, I can't. Oh, mother, you mean well, but you will drive me mad."

Mrs. Little forebore to press him further just then. She sat silent at her work, and he at his, till they were aroused by a fly drawing up at the door.

A fine young woman got out with something heavy, and holding it like a child in one arm, rapped at the door with the hand that was disengaged.

Mrs. Little opened the door to her, and she and Jael Dence surveyed each other with calm but searching eyes.

"If you please, ma'am, does Mr. Little bide here?"

Mrs. Little said yes, with a smile: for Jael's face and modesty pleased her at first sight.

"I have something for him."

"I'll give it to him."

"If you please, ma'am, I was to give it him myself."

Henry recognized the voice, opened the door, and invited her in.

Mrs. Little followed her, full of suppressed curiosity.

This put Jael out, but she was too patient to show it.

"It is the bust," said she; and put it softly down on the table with her strong arms.

Henry groaned. "She despises even that; she flings it at my head without a word."

"Nay; I have got a note for you."

"Then why didn't you give it me at once?" cried Henry impatiently.

She handed him the note without a word.

It ran thus:--

"Miss Carden presents her compliments to Mr. Little, and sends him his beautiful bust. She is grieved that he will accept no remuneration for his lessons; and begs permission to offer her best wishes for his happiness and prosperity."

The gentleness of this disarmed Henry, and at the same time the firmness crushed him. "It is all over!" he cried, despairingly: "and yet I can't hate her."

He ran from the room, unable to restrain his tears, and too proud and fiery to endure two spectators of his grief.

Mrs. Little felt as mothers feel toward those who wound their young.

"Is it the woman's likeness?" said she bitterly, and then trembled with emotion.

"Ay."

"May I see it?"

"Surely, ma'am." And Jael began to undo the paper.

But Mrs. Little stopped her. "No, not yet. I couldn't bear the sight of a face that has brought misery upon him. I would rather look at yours. It is a very honest one. May I inquire your name?"

"Jael Dence--at your service."

"Dence! ah, then no wonder you have a good face: a Cairnhope face. My child, you remind me of days gone by. Come and see me again, will you? Then I shall be more able to talk to you quietly."

"Ay, that I will, ma'am." And Jael colored all over with surprise, and such undisguised pleasure that Mrs. Little kissed her at parting.

She had been gone a considerable time, when Henry came back; he found his mother seated at the table, eying his masterpiece with stern and bitter scrutiny.

It was a picture, those two rare faces in such close opposition. The carved face seemed alive; but the living face seemed inspired, and to explore the other to the bottom with merciless severity. At such work the great female eye is almost terrible in its power.

"It is lovely," said she. "It seems noble. I can not find what I know must be there. Oh, why does God give such a face as this to a fool?"

"Not a word against her," said Henry. "She is as wise, and as noble, and as good, as she is beautiful. She has but one fault; she loves another man. Put her sweet face away; hide it from me till I am an old man, and can bring it out to show young folks why I lived and die a bachelor. Good-bye, dear mother, I must saddle Black Harry, and away to my night's work."

The days were very short now, and Henry spent two-thirds of his time in Cairnhope Church. The joyous stimulus of his labor was gone but the habit remained, and carried him on in a sort of leaden way. Sometimes he wondered at himself for the hardships he underwent merely to make money, since money had no longer the same charm for him; but a good workman is a patient, enduring creature, and self-indulgence, our habit, is after all, his exception. Henry worked heavily on, with his sore, sad heart, as many a workman had done before him. Unfortunately his sleep began to be broken a good deal. I am not quite clear whether it was the after-clap of the explosion, or the prolonged agitation of his young heart, but at this time, instead of the profound sleep that generally rewards the sons of toil, he had fitful slumbers, and used to dream strange dreams, in that old church, so full of gaunt sights and strange sounds. And, generally speaking, however these dreams began, the figure of Grace Carden would steal in ere he awoke. His senses, being only half asleep, colored his dreams; he heard her light footstep in the pattering rain, and her sweet voice in the musical moan of the desolate building; desolate as his heart when he awoke, and behold it was a dream.

The day after Christmas Day began brightly, but was dark and lowering toward afternoon. Mrs. Little advised Henry to stay at home. But he shook his head. "How could I get through the night? Work is my salvation. But for my forge, I should perhaps end like----" he was going to say "my poor father." But he had the sense to stop.

Unable to keep him at home, the tender mother got his saddlebags, and filled his flask with brandy, and packed up a huge piece of Yorkshire pie, and even stuffed in a plaid shawl. And she strained her anxious eyes after him as he rode off.

When he got among the hills, he found it was snowing there very hard; and then, somehow, notwithstanding all the speed he made, it was nearly dark when he got on the moor, and the tracks he used to go by, over the dangerous ground, were effaced.

He went a snail's pace, and at last dismounted, and groped his way. He got more than one fall in the snow, and thought himself very fortunate, when, at last, something black towered before him, and it was the old church.

The scene was truly dismal: the church was already overburdened with snow, and still the huge flakes fell fast and silently, and the little mountain stream, now swollen to a broad and foaming torrent, went roaring by, behind the churchyard wall.

Henry shivered, and made for the shelter.

The horse, to whom this church was merely a well-ventilated stable, went in and clattered up the aisle, saddle-bags and all.

Henry locked the door inside, and soon blew the coals to a white heat. The bellows seemed to pant unnaturally loud, all was so deadly still.

The windows were curtained with snow, that increased the general gloom, though some of the layers shone ghostly white and crystalline, in the light of the forge, and of two little grates he had set in a monument.

Two heaps of snow lay in the center aisle, just under two open places in the roof, and, on these, flakes as big as a pennypiece kept falling through the air, and glittered like diamonds as they passed through the weird light of the white coals.

Oh! it was an appalling place, that night; youth and life seemed intruders. Henry found it more than he could bear. He took a couple of candles, placed them in bottles, and carried them to the western window, and there lighted them. This one window was protected by the remains of iron-work outside, and the whole figure of one female saint in colored glass survived.

This expedient broke the devilish blackness, and the saint shone out glorious.

The horrid spell thus broken in some degree, Henry plied his hammer, and made the church ring, and the flaming metal fly.

But by-and-by, as often happened to him now, a drowsiness overcame him at the wrong time. In vain he battled against it. It conquered him even as he worked; and, at last, he leaned with his arms against the handle of the bellows, and dozed as he stood.

He had a dream of that kind which we call a vision, because the dream seems to come to the dreamer where he is.

He dreamed he was there at his forge, and a soft voice called to him. He turned, and lo! between him and the western window stood six female figures, all dressed in beautiful dresses, but of another age, and of many colors, yet transparent; and their faces fair, but white as snow: and the ladies courtesied to him, with a certain respectful majesty beyond description: and, somehow, by their faces, and their way of courtesying to him, he knew they were women of his own race, and themselves aware of the relationship.

Then several more such figures came rustling softly through the wall from the churchyard, and others rose from the vaults and took their places quietly, till there was an avenue of dead beauties; and they stood in an ascending line up to the west window. Some stood on the ground, some on the air; that made no difference to them.

Another moment, and then a figure more lovely than them all shone in the window, at the end of that vista of fair white faces.

It was Grace Carden. She smiled on him and said, "I am going where I can love you. There the world will not divide us. Follow me: follow; follow!"

Then she melted away; then all melted: and he awoke with a loud cry that echoed through the edifice, now dark and cold as the grave; and a great white owl went whirling, and with his wings made the only air that stirred.

The fire was out, and the place a grave. Yet, cold as it was, the dreamer was bathed in perspiration, so clear had been that unearthly vision, so ghostly was now that flitting owl.

Shuddering all over, he lighted his fire again, and plied his bellows with fury, till the fire glowed brighter than ever; and even then he prayed aloud that he might never see the like again, even in a dream.

He worked like mad, and his hand trembled as he struck. Ere he had thoroughly recovered the shock, a wild cry arose outside.

He started back, awe-struck.

What with the time, the place, and that strange vision, the boundaries of the natural and the supernatural were a little confused in his mind.

"Help, help!" cried a voice; and now the familiar tone of that voice made him utter a loud cry in return.

He searched for the key, and made his way to the door; but, just as he began to insert the key, the voice was at the door outside.

"Oh, save me! A dying girl! Save me!"

The cry was now a moan, and the next moment an inert mass fell like lead against the door in a vain attempt to knock at it.

The voice was Grace Carden's, and it was Grace Carden's body that fell so inert and powerless against the church-door, within a yard of Henry Little's hand.

On the twenty-fourth of December Miss Carden and Jael Dence drove to Cairnhope village, and stopped at the farm: but Nathan and his eldest daughter had already gone up to the Hall; so they waited there but a minute or two to light the carriage lamps, and then went on up the hill. It was pitch dark when they reached the house. Inside, one of Mr. Raby's servants was on the look-out for the sound of wheels, and the visitors had no need to knock or ring; this was a point of honor with the master of the mansion; when he did invite people, the house opened its arms; even as they drove up, open flew the great hall-door, and an enormous fire inside blazed in their faces, and shot its flame beyond them out into the night.

Grace alighted, and was about to enter the house, when Jael stopped her, and said, "Oh, miss, you will be going in left foot foremost. Pray don't do that: it is so unlucky."

Grace laughed, but changed her foot, and entered a lofty hall, hung with helmets, pikes, breast-plates, bows, cross-bows, antlers etc., etc. Opposite her was the ancient chimneypiece and ingle-nook, with no grate but two huge iron dogs, set five feet apart; and on them lay a birch log and root, the size of a man, with a dozen beech billets burning briskly and crackling underneath and aside it. This genial furnace warmed the staircase and passages, and cast a fiery glow out on the carriage, and glorified the steep helmets and breast-plates of the dead Rabys on the wall, and the sparkling eyes of the two beautiful women who now stood opposite it in the pride of their youth, and were warmed to the heart by its crackle and glow. "Oh! what a glorious fire, this bitter night. Why, I never saw such a----"

"It is the yule log, miss. Ay, and you might go all round England, and not find its fellow, I trow. But our Squire he don't go to the chandler's shop for his yule log, but to his own woods, and fells a great tree."

A housemaid now came forward with bed candles, to show Miss Carden to her room. Grace was going up, as a matter of course, when Jael, busy helping the footman with her boxes, called after her: "The stocking, miss! the stocking!"

Grace looked down at her feet in surprise.

"There it is, hung up by the door. We must put our presents into it before we go upstairs."

"Must we? what on earth am I to give?"

"Oh, any thing will do. See, I shall put in this crooked sixpence."

Grace examined her purse, and complained that all her stupid sixpences were straight.

"Never mind, miss; put in a hairpin, sooner than pass the stocking o' Christmas Eve."

Grace had come prepared to encounter old customs. She offered her shawl-pin: and Jael, who had modestly inserted her own gift, pinned Grace's offering on the outside of the stocking with a flush of pride. Then they went upstairs with the servant, and Grace was ushered into a bedroom of vast size, with two huge fires burning at each end; each fireplace was flanked with a coal-scuttle full of kennel coal in large lumps, and also with an enormous basket of beech billets. She admired the old-fashioned furniture, and said, "Oh, what a palace of a bedroom! This will spoil me for my little poky room. Here one can roam about and have great thoughts. Hillsborough, good-bye! I end my days in the country."

Presently her quick ears caught the rattle of swift wheels upon the hard road: she ran to the window, and peeped behind the curtain. Two brilliant lamps were in sight, and drew nearer and nearer, like great goggling eyes, and soon a neat dog-cart came up to the door. Before it had well-stopped, the hospitable door flew open, and the yule fire shone on Mr. Coventry, and his natty groom, and his dog cart with plated axles; it illumined the silver harness, and the roan horse himself, and the breath that poured into the keen air from his nostrils red inside.

Mr. Coventry dropped from his shoulders, with easy grace, something between a coat and a cloak, lined throughout with foxes' skin; and, alighting, left his groom to do the rest. The fur was reddish, relieved with occasional white; and Grace gloated over it, as it lay glowing in the fire-light. "Ah," said she, "I should never do for a poor man's wife: I'm so fond of soft furs and things, and I don't like poky rooms." With that she fell into a reverie, which was only interrupted by the arrival of Jael and her boxes.

Jael helped her unpack, and dress. There was no lack of conversation between these two, but most of it turned upon nothings. One topic, that might have been interesting to the readers of this tale, was avoided by them both. They had now come to have a high opinion of each other's penetration, and it made them rather timid and reserved on that subject.

Grace was dressed, and just going down, when she found she wanted a pin. She asked Jael for one.

Jael looked aghast. "Oh, miss, I'd rather you would take one, in spite of me."

"Well, so I will. There!" And she whipped one away from the bosom of Jael's dress.

"Mind, I never gave it you."

"No. I took it by brute force."

"I like you too well to give you a pin."

"May I venture to inquire what would be the consequence?"

"Ill luck, you may be sure. Heart-trouble, they do say."

"Well, I'm glad to escape that so easily. Why, this is the temple of superstition, and you are the high-Priestess. How shall I ever get on at dinner, without you? I know I shall do something to shock Mr. Raby. Perhaps spill the very salt. I generally do."

"Ay, miss, at home. But, dear heart, you won't see any of them nasty little salt-cellars here, that some crazy creature have invented to bring down bad luck. You won't spill the salt here, no fear: but don't ye let any body help you to it neither, if he helps you to salt, he helps you to sorrow."

"Oh, does he? Then it is fortunate nobody ever does help anybody to salt. Well, yours is a nice creed. Why, we are all at the mercy of other people, according to you. Say I have a rival: she smiles in my face, and says, 'My sweet friend, accept this tribute of my esteem;' and gives me a pinch of salt, before I know where I am. I wither on the spot; and she sails off with the prize. Or, if there is no salt about, she comes behind me with a pin, and pins it to my skirt, and that pierces my heart. Don't you see what abominable nonsense it all is?"

The argument was cut short by the ringing of a tremendous bell.

Grace gave the last, swift, searching, all-comprehensive look of her sex into the glass, and went down to the drawing-room. There she found Mr. Raby and Mr. Coventry, who both greeted her cordially; and the next moment dinner was announced.

"Raby Hall" was a square house, with two large low wings. The left wing contained the kitchen, pantry, scullery, bakehouse, brew-house, etc.; and servants' bedrooms above. The right wing the stables, coach-houses, cattle-sheds, and several bedrooms. The main building of the hall, the best bedrooms, and the double staircase, leading up to them in horse-shoe form from the hall: and, behind the hall, on the ground-floor, there was a morning-room, in which several of the Squire's small tenants were even now preparing for supper by drinking tea, and eating cakes made in rude imitation of the infant Saviour. On the right of the hall were the two drawing-rooms en suite, and on the left was the remarkable room into which the host now handed Miss Carden, and Mr. Coventry followed. This room had been, originally, the banqueting-hall. It was about twenty feet high, twenty-eight feet wide, and fifty feet long, and ended in an enormous bay window, that opened upon the lawn. It was entirely paneled with oak, carved by old Flemish workmen, and adorned here and there with bold devices. The oak, having grown old in a pure atmosphere, and in a district where wood and roots were generally burned in dining-rooms, had acquired a very rich and beautiful color, a pure and healthy reddish brown, with no tinge whatever of black; a mighty different hue from any you can find in Wardour Street. Plaster ceiling there was none, and never had been. The original joists, and beams, and boards, were still there, only not quite so rudely fashioned as of old; for Mr. Raby's grandfather had caused them to be planed and varnished, and gilded a little in serpentine lines. This woodwork above gave nobility to the room, and its gilding, though worn, relieved the eye agreeably.

The further end was used as a study, and one side of it graced with books, all handsomely bound: the other side, with a very beautiful organ that had an oval mirror in the midst of its gilt dummy-pipes. All this made a cozy nook in the grand room.

What might be called the dining-room part, though rich, was rather somber on ordinary occasions; but this night it was decorated gloriously. The materials were simple--wax-candles and holly; the effect was produced by a magnificent use of these materials. There were eighty candles, of the largest size sold in shops, and twelve wax pillars, five feet high, and the size of a man's calf; of these, four only were lighted at present. The holly was not in sprigs, but in enormous branches, that filled the eye with glistening green and red: and, in the embrasure of the front window stood a young holly-tree entire, eighteen feet high, and gorgeous with five hundred branches of red berries. The tree had been dug up, and planted here in an enormous bucket, used for that purpose, and filled with mold.

Close behind this tree were placed two of the wax pillars, lighted, and their flame shone through the leaves and berries magically.

As Miss Carden entered, on Mr. Raby's arm, her eye swept the room with complacency, and settled on the holly-tree. At sight of that she pinched Mr. Raby's arm, and cried "Oh!" three times. Then, ignoring the dinner-table altogether, she pulled her host away to the tree, and stood before it, with clasped hands. "Oh, how beautiful!"

Mr. Raby was gratified. "So then our forefathers were not quite such fools as some people say."

"They were angels, they were ducks. It is beautiful, it is divine."

Mr. Raby looked at the glowing cheek, and deep, sparkling, sapphire eye. "Come," said he; "after all, there's nothing here so beautiful as the young lady who now honors the place with her presence."

With this he handed her ceremoniously to a place at his right hand; said a short grace, and sat down between his two guests.

"But, Mr. Raby," said Grace, ruefully, "I'm with my back to the holly-tree."

"You can ask Coventry to change places."

Mr. Coventry rose, and the change was effected.

"Well, it is your doing, Coventry. Now she'll overlook you."

"All the better for me, perhaps. I'm content: Miss Carden will look at the holly, and I shall look at Miss Carden."

"Faute de mieux."

"C'est méchant."

"And I shall fine you both a bumper of champagne, for going out of the English language."

"I shall take my punishment like a man."

"Then take mine as well. Champagne with me means frenzy."

But, in the midst of the easy banter and jocose airy nothings of the modern dining-room, an object attracted Grace's eye. It was a picture, with its face turned to the wall, and some large letters on the back of the canvas.

This excited Grace's curiosity directly, and, whenever she could, without being observed, she peeped, and tried to read the inscription; but, what with Mr. Raby's head, and a monster candle that stood before it, she could not decipher it unobserved. She was inclined to ask Mr. Raby; but she was very quick, and, observing that the other portraits were of his family, she suspected at once that the original of this picture had offended her host, and that it would be in bad taste, and might be offensive, to question him. Still the subject took possession of her.

At about eight o'clock a servant announced candles in the drawing-room.

Upon this Mr. Raby rose, and, without giving her any option on the matter, handed her to the door with obsolete deference.

In the drawing-room she found a harpsichord, a spinet, and a piano, all tuned expressly for her. This amused her, as she had never seen either of the two older instruments in her life. She played on them all three.

Mr. Raby had the doors thrown open to hear her.

She played some pretty little things from Mendelssohn, Spohr, and Schubert.

The gentlemen smoked and praised.

Then she found an old music-book, and played Handel's overture to Otho, and the minuet.

The gentlemen left off praising directly, and came silently into the room to hear the immortal melodist. But this is the rule in music; the lips praise the delicate gelatinous, the heart beats in silence at the mighty melodious.

Tea and coffee came directly afterward, and ere they were disposed of, a servant announced "The Wassailers."

"Well, let them come in," said Mr. Raby.

The school-children and young people of the village trooped in, and made their obeisances, and sang the Christmas Carol--

"God rest you, merry gentlemen,
Let nothing you dismay."

Then one of the party produced an image of the Virgin and Child, and another offered comfits in a box; a third presented the wassail-cup, into which Raby immediately poured some silver, and Coventry followed his example. Grace fumbled for her purse, and, when she had found it, began to fumble in it for her silver.

But Raby lost all patience, and said, "There, I give this for the lady, and she'll pay me next Christmas."

The wassailers departed, and the Squire went to say a kind word to his humbler guests.

Miss Carden took that opportunity to ask Mr. Coventry if he had noticed the picture with its face to the wall. He said he had.

"Do you know who it is?"

"No idea."

"Did you read the inscription?"

"No. But, if you are curious, I'll go back to the dining-room, and read it."

"I'm afraid he might be angry. There is no excuse for going there now."

"Send me for your pocket-handkerchief."

"Please see whether I have left my pocket-handkerchief in the dining-room, Mr. Coventry," said Grace, demurely.

Mr. Coventry smiled, and hurried away. But he soon came back to say that the candles were all out, the windows open, and the servants laying the cloth for supper.

"Oh, never mind, then," said Grace; "when we go in to supper I'll look myself."

But a considerable time elapsed before supper, and Mr. Coventry spent this time in making love rather ardently, and Grace in defending herself rather feebly.

It was nearly eleven o'clock when Mr. Raby rejoined them, and they all went in to supper. There were candles lighted on the table and a few here and there upon the walls; but the room was very somber: and Mr. Raby informed them this was to remind them of the moral darkness, in which the world lay before that great event they were about to celebrate.

He then helped each of them to a ladleful of frumety, remarking at the same time, with a grim smile, that they were not obliged to eat it; there would be a very different supper after midnight.

Then a black-letter Bible was brought him, and he read it all to himself at a side-table.

After an interval of silence so passed there was a gentle tap at the bay window. Mr. Raby went and threw it open, and immediately a woman's voice, full, clear, and ringing, sang outside:--

"The first Noel the angels did say,
Was to three poor shepherds, in fields as they lay,
In fields where they were keeping their sheep,
On a cold winter's night that was so deep.
Chorus.--Noel, Noel, Noel, Noel,
Born is the King of Israel."

The chorus also was sung outside.

During the chorus one of the doors opened, and Jael Dence came in by it; and the treble singer, who was the blacksmith's sister, came in at the window, and so the two women met in the room, and sang the second verse in sweetest harmony. These two did not sing like invalids, as their more refined sisters too often do; from their broad chests, and healthy lungs, and noble throats, and above all, their musical hearts, they poured out the harmony so clear and full, that every glass in the room rang like a harp, and a bolt of ice seemed to shoot down Grace Carden's backbone; and, in the chorus, gentle George's bass was like a diapason.

"They looked up and saw a star
That shone in the East beyond them far,
And unto the earth it gave a great light,
And so it continued both day and night.
Chorus.--Noel, Noel, Noel, Noel,
Born is the King of Israel."

As the Noel proceeded, some came in at the window, others at the doors, and the lower part of the room began to fill with singers and auditors.

The Noel ended: there was a silence, during which the organ was opened, the bellows blown, and a number of servants and others came into the room with little lighted tapers, and stood, in a long row, awaiting a signal from the Squire.

He took out his watch, and, finding it was close on twelve o'clock, directed the doors to be flung open, that he might hear the great clock in the hall strike the quarters.

There was a solemn hush of expectation, that made the sensitive heart of Grace Carden thrill with anticipation.

The clock struck the first quarter--dead silence; the second--the third--dead silence.

But, at the fourth, and with the first stroke of midnight, out burst the full organ and fifty voices, with the Gloria in excelsis Deo; and, as that divine hymn surged on, the lighters ran along the walls and lighted the eighty candles, and, for the first time, the twelve waxen pillars, so that, as the hymn concluded, the room was in a blaze, and it was Christmas Day.

Instantly an enormous punch-bowl was brought to the host. He put his lips to it, and said, "Friends, neighbors, I wish you all a merry Christmas." Then there was a cheer that made the whole house echo; and, by this time, the tears were running down Grace Carden's cheeks.

She turned aside, to hide her pious emotion, and found herself right opposite the picture, with this inscription, large and plain, in the blaze of light--

If, in the middle of the pious harmony that had stirred her soul, some blaring trumpet had played a polka, in another key, it could hardly have jarred more upon her devotional frame, than did this earthly line, that glared out between two gigantic yule candles, just lighted in honor of Him, whose mother was in trade when he was born.

She turned from it with deep repugnance, and seated herself in silence at the table.

Very early in the supper she made an excuse, and retired to her room: and, as she went out, her last glance was at the mysterious picture.

She saw it again next morning at breakfast-time; but, it must be owned, with different eyes. It was no longer contrasted with a religious ceremony, and with the sentiments of gratitude and humility proper to that great occasion, when we commemorate His birth, whose mother had gone into trade. The world, and society, whose child she was, seemed now to speak with authority from the canvas, and to warn her how vain and hopeless were certain regrets, which lay secretly, I might say clandestinely, at her heart.

She revered her godfather, and it was no small nor irrelevant discovery to find that he had actually turned a picture in disgrace to the wall, because its owner had descended to the level, or probably not quite to the level, of Henry Little.

Jael Dence came up from the farm on Christmas afternoon, and almost the first word Grace spoke was to ask her if she knew whose picture that was in the dining-room. This vague description was enough for Jael. She said she could not tell for certain, but she had once heard her father say it was the Squire's own sister; but, when she had pressed him on the subject, the old man had rebuked her--told her not to meddle too much with other folks' business. "And, to be sure, Squire has his reasons, no doubt," said Jael, rather dryly.

"The reason that is written on the back?"

"Ay: and a very poor reason too, to my mind."

"You are not the best judge of that--excuse me for saying so. Oh dear, I wish I could see it."

"Don't think of such a thing, miss. You can't, however, for it's padlocked down that way you could never loose it without being found out. No longer agone than last Yule-time 'twas only turned, and not fastened. But they say in the kitchen, that one day last month Squire had them all up, and said the picture had been tampered with while he was at Hillsboro'; and he scolded, and had it strapped and padlocked down as 'tis."

The reader can imagine the effect of these fresh revelations. And a lover was at hand, of good birth, good manners, and approved by her godfather. That lover saw her inclining toward him, and omitted nothing to compliment and please her. To be sure, that was no uphill work, for he loved her better than he had ever loved a woman in his life, which was a good deal to say, in his case.

They spent Christmas Day very happily together. Church in the morning; then luncheon; then thick boots, a warmer shawl, and a little walk all together; for Mr. Raby took a middle course; since no positive engagement existed, he would not allow his fair guest to go about with Mr. Coventry alone, and so he compromised, even in village eyes; but, on the other hand, by stopping now and then to give an order, or exchange a word, he gave Coventry many opportunities, and that gentleman availed himself of them with his usual tact.

In the evening they sat round the great fire, and Mr. Raby mulled and spiced red wine by a family receipt, in a large silver saucepan; and they sipped the hot and generous beverage, and told stories and legends, the custom of the house on Christmas night. Mr. Raby was an inexhaustible repertory of ghost-stories and popular legends. But I select one that was told by Mr. Coventry, and told with a certain easy grace that gave it no little interest.

"When I was quite a child, there was a very old woman living in our village, that used to frighten me with her goggle eyes, and muttering. She passed for a witch, I think; and when she died--I was eight years old then--old people put their heads together, and told strange stories about her early life. It seems that this Molly Slater was away in service at Bollington, a village half way between our place and Hillsborough, and her fellow-servants used to quiz her because she had no sweetheart. At last, she told them to wait till next Hillsborough fair, and they should see. And just before the fair, she reminded them of their sneers, and said she would not come home without a sweetheart, though she took the Evil one himself. For all that, she did leave the fair alone. But, as she trudged home in the dark, a man overtook her, and made acquaintance with her. He was a pleasant fellow, and told her his name was William Easton. Of course she could not see his face very well, but he had a wonderfully sweet voice. After that night, he used to court her, and sing to her, but always in the dark. He never would face a candle, though he was challenged to more than once. One night there was a terrible noise heard--it is described as if a number of men were threshing out corn upon the roof--and Molly Slater was found wedged in between the bed and the wall, in a place where there was scarcely room to put your hand. Several strong men tried to extricate her by force; but both the bed and the woman's body resisted so strangely that, at last, they thought it best to send for the parson. He was a great scholar, and himself under some suspicion of knowing more than it would be good for any less pious person to know. Well, the parson came, and took a candle that was burning, and held it to the place where poor Molly was imprisoned, and moaning; and they say he turned pale, and shivered, for all his learning. I forget what he said or did next; but by-and-by there was a colloquy in a whisper between him and some person unseen, and they say that this unseen whisper was very sweet, and something like the chords of a harp, only low and very articulate. The parson whispered, 'God gives a sinner time.' The sweet voice answered, 'He can afford to; he is the stronger.' Then the parson adjured the unseen one to wait a year and a day. But he refused, still in the gentlest voice. Then the parson said these words: 'By all we love and fear, by all you fear and hate, I adjure you to loose her, or wait till next Christmas Eve.'

"I suppose the Evil Spirit saw some trap in that proposal, for he is said to have laughed most musically. He answered, 'By all I fear and hate, I'll loose her never; but, but I'll wait for her--till the candle's burnt out;' and he chuckled most musically again.

"'Then wait to all eternity,' the parson roared; and blew the candle out directly, and held it, with his hands crossed over it."

Grace Carden's eyes sparkled in the firelight. "Go on," she cried, excitedly.

"The girl was loosed easily enough after that; but she was found to be in a swoon; and not the least bruised, though ten villagers had been pulling at her one after another."

"And what became of her afterward?"

"She lived to be ninety-six, and died in my time. I think she had money left her. But she never married; and when she was old she wandered about the lanes, muttering, and frightening little boys, myself among the number. But now my little story follows another actor of the tale."

"Oh, I'm so glad it is not over."

"No. The parson took the candle away, and it was never seen again. But, somehow, it got wind that he had built it into the wall of the church; perhaps he didn't say so, but was only understood to say so. However, people used to look round the church for the place. And now comes the most remarkable thing of all; three years ago the present rector repaired the floor of the chancel, intending to put down encaustic tiles. Much to his surprise, the workmen found plenty of old encaustic tiles; they had been interred as rubbish at some period, when antiquity and beauty were less respected than they are now, I suppose."

Mr. Raby broke in, "The Puritans. Barbarians! beasts! It was just like them. Well, sir----?"

"When the rector found that, he excavated more than was absolutely necessary for his purpose, and the deeper he went the more encaustic tiles. In one place they got down to the foundation, and they found an oak chest fast in the rock--a sort of channel had been cut in the rock for this chest, or rather box (for it was only about eighteen inches long), to lie in. The master mason was there luckily, and would not move it till the rector had seen it. He was sent for, but half the parish was there before him; and he tells me there were three theories firmly established and proved, before he could finish his breakfast and get to the spot. Theory of Wilder, the village grocer: 'It is treasure hidden by them there sly old monks.' Mr. Wilder is a miser, and is known to lay up money. He is, I believe, the only man left in the North Country who can show you a hundred spade guineas."

Mr. Raby replied, energetically, "I respect him. Wilder forever! What was the next theory?"

"The skeleton of a child. I forget who propounded this; but I believe it carried the majority. But the old sexton gave it a blow. 'Nay, nay,' said he; 'them's the notions of strangers. I was born here, and my father afore me. It will be Molly Slater's candle, and naught else.' Then poor Molly's whole story came up again over the suspected box. But I am very tedious."

"Tedious! You are delightful, and thrilling, and pray go on. The rector had the box opened?"

"On the spot."

"Well!"

"The box went to pieces, in spite of all their care. But there was no doubt as to its contents."

Grace exclaimed, enthusiastically, "A candle. Oh, do say a candle!"

Mr. Coventry responded, "It's awfully tempting; but I suspect the traditional part of my story is slightly embellished: so the historical part must be accurate. What the box did really contain, to my knowledge, was a rush-wick, much thicker than they are made nowadays: and this rush-wick was impregnated with grease, and even lightly coated with a sort of brown wafer-like paste. The rector thinks it was a combination of fine dust from the box with the original grease. He shall show it you, if you are curious to see it."

"Of course we are curious. Oh, Mr. Raby, what a strange story. And how well he told it."

"Admirably. We must drink his health."

"I'll wish it him instead, because I require all my reason just now to understand his story. And I don't understand it, after all. There: you found the candle, and so it is all true. But what does the rector think?"

"Well, he says there is no connection whatever between the rush-wick and----"

"Don't tell her what he says," cried Raby, with a sudden fury that made Grace start and open her eyes. "I know the puppy. He is what is called a divine nowadays; but used to be called a skeptic. There never was so infidel an age. Socinus was content to prove Jesus Christ a man; but Renan has gone and proved him a Frenchman. Nothing is so gullible as an unbeliever. The right reverend father in God, Cocker, has gnawed away the Old Testament: the Oxford doctors are nibbling away the New: nothing escapes but the apocrypha: yet these same skeptics believe the impudent lies, and monstrous arithmetic of geology, which babbles about a million years, a period actually beyond the comprehension of the human intellect; and takes up a jaw-bone, that some sly navvy has transplanted over-night from the churchyard into Lord knows what stratum, fees the navvy, gloats over the bone, and knocks the Bible down with it. No, Mr. Coventry, your story is a good one, and well told; don't let us defile it with the comments of a skeptical credulous pedant. Fill your glass, sir. Here's to old religion, old stories, old songs, old houses, old wine, old friends, or" (recovering himself with admirable grace) "to new friends that are to be old ones ere we die. Come, let the stronger vessel drink, and the weaker vessel sip, and all say together, after me--

"Well may we all be,
Ill may we never see,
That make good company,
Beneath the roof of Raby."

When this rude rhyme had been repeated in chorus, there was a little silence, and the conversation took a somewhat deeper tone. It began through Grace asking Mr. Raby, with all the simplicity of youth, whether he had ever seen anything supernatural with his own eyes. "For instance," said she, "this deserted church of yours, that you say the shepherd said he saw on fire--did you see that?"

"Not I. Indeed, the church is not in sight from here. No, Grace, I never saw any thing supernatural: and I am sorry for it, for I laugh at people's notion that a dead man has any power to injure the living; how can a cold wind come from a disembodied spirit? I am all that a ghost is, and something more; and I only wish I could call the dead from their graves; I'd soon have a dozen gentlemen and ladies out of that old church-yard into this very room. And, if they would only come, you would see me converse with them as civilly and as calmly as I am doing with you. The fact is, I have some questions to put, which only the dead can answer--passages in the family correspondence, referring to things I can't make out for the life of me."

"Oh, Mr. Raby, pray don't talk in this dreadful way, for fear they should be angry and come." And Grace looked fearfully round over her shoulder.

Mr. Raby shook his head; and there was a dead silence.

Mr. Raby broke it rather unexpectedly. "But," said he, gravely, "if I have seen nothing, I've heard something. Whether it was supernatural, I can't say; but, at least, it was unaccountable and terrible. I have heard THE GABRIEL HOUNDS."

Mr. Coventry and Grace looked at one another, and then inquired, almost in a breath, what the Gabriel hounds were.

"A strange thing in the air that is said, in these parts, to foretell calamity."

"Oh dear!" said Grace, "this is thrilling again; pray tell us."

"Well, one night I was at Hillsborough on business, and, as I walked by the old parish church, a great pack of beagles, in full cry, passed close over my head."

"Oh!"

"Yes; they startled me, as I never was startled in my life before. I had never heard of the Gabriel hounds then, and I was stupefied. I think I leaned against the wall there full five minutes, before I recovered myself, and went on."

"Oh dear! But did any thing come of it?"

"You shall judge for yourself. I had left a certain house about an hour and a half: there was trouble in that house, but only of a pecuniary kind. To tell the truth, I came back with some money for them, or rather, I should say, with the promise of it. I found the wife in a swoon: and, upstairs, her husband lay dead by his own hand."

"Oh, my poor godpapa!" cried Grace, flinging her arm tenderly round his neck.

"Ay, my child, and the trouble did not end there. Insult followed; ingratitude; and a family feud, which is not healed yet, and never will be--till she and her brat come on their knees to me."

Mr. Raby had no sooner uttered these last words with great heat, than he was angry with himself. "Ah!" said he, "the older a man gets, the weaker. To think of my mentioning that to you young people!" And he rose and walked about the room in considerable agitation and vexation. "Curse the Gabriel hounds! It is the first time I have spoken of them since that awful night; it is the last I ever will speak of them. What they are, God, who made them, knows. Only I pray I may never hear them again, nor any friend of mine."

Next morning Jael Dence came up to the hall, and almost the first question Grace asked her was, whether she had ever heard of the Gabriel hounds.

Jael looked rather puzzled. Grace described them after Mr. Raby.

"Why, that will be Gabble Retchet," said Jael. "I wouldn't talk much about the like, if I was you, miss."

But Grace persisted, and, at last, extracted from her that sounds had repeatedly been heard in the air at night, as of a pack of hounds in full cry, and that these hounds ran before trouble. "But," said Jael, solemnly, "they are not hounds at all; they are the souls of unbaptized children, wandering in the air till the day of judgment."

This description, however probable, had the effect of making Grace disbelieve the phenomenon altogether, and she showed her incredulity by humming a little air.

But Jael soon stopped that. "Oh, miss, pray don't do so. If you sing before breakfast, you'll cry before supper."

At breakfast, Mr. Coventry invited Miss Carden to go to the top of Cairnhope Peak, and look over four counties. He also told her she could see Bollinghope house, his own place, very well from the Peak.

Grace assented: and, immediately after breakfast, begged Jael to be in the way to accompany her. She divined, with feminine quickness, that Mr. Coventry would be very apt, if he pointed out Bollinghope House to her from the top of a mountain, to say, "Will you be its mistress?" but, possibly, she did not wish to be hurried, or it may have been only a mere instinct, an irrational impulse of self-defense, with which the judgment had nothing to do; or perhaps it was simple modesty. Any way, she engaged Jael to be of the party.

It was talked of again at luncheon, and then Mr. Raby put in a word. "I have one stipulation to make, young people, and that is that you go up the east side, and down the same way. It is all safe walking on that side. I shall send you in my four-wheel to the foot of the hill, and George will wait for you there at the 'Colley Dog' public-house, and bring you home again."

This was, of course, accepted with thanks, and the four-wheel came round at two o'clock. Jael was seated in front by the side of George, who drove; Mr. Coventry and Grace, behind. He had his fur-cloak to keep his companion warm on returning from the hill; but Mr. Raby, who did nothing by halves, threw in some more wraps, and gave a warm one to Jael; she was a favorite with him, as indeed were all the Dences.

They started gayly, and rattled off at a good pace. Before they had got many yards on the high-road, they passed a fir-plantation, belonging to Mr. Raby, and a magpie fluttered out of this, and flew across the road before them.

Jael seized the reins, and pulled them so powerfully, she stopped the pony directly. "Oh, the foul bird!" she cried, "turn back! turn back!"

"What for?" inquired Mr. Coventry.

"We shall meet with trouble else. One magpie! and right athwart us too."

"What nonsense!" said Grace.

"Nay, nay, it is not; Squire knows better. Wait just one minute, till I speak to Squire." She sprang from the carriage with one bound, and, holding up her dress with one hand, ran into the house like a lapwing.

"The good, kind, silly thing!" said Grace Carden.

Jael soon found Mr. Raby, and told him about the magpie, and begged him to come out and order them back.

But Mr. Raby smiled, and shook his head. "That won't do. Young ladies and gentlemen of the present day don't believe in omens."

"But you do know better, sir. I have heard father say you were going into Hillsborough with him one day, and a magpie flew across, and father persuaded you to turn back."

"That is true; he was going in to buy some merino sheep, and I to deposit my rents in Carrington's bank. Next day the bank broke. And the merino sheep all died within the year. But how many thousand times does a magpie cross us and nothing come of it? Come, run away, my good girl, and don't keep them waiting."

Jael obeyed, with a sigh. She went back to her party--they were gone. The carriage was just disappearing round a turn in the road. She looked at it with amazement, and even with anger. It seemed to her a brazen act of bad faith.

"I wouldn't have believed it of her," said she, and went back to the house, mortified and grieved. She did not go to Mr. Raby again; but he happened to catch sight of her about an hour afterward, and called to her--"How is this, Jael? Have you let them go alone, because of a magpie?" And he looked displeased.

"Nay, sir: she gave me the slip, while I went to speak to you for her good; and I call it a dirty trick, saving your presence. I told her I'd be back in a moment."

"Oh, it is not her doing, you may be sure; it is the young gentleman. He saw a chance to get her alone, and of course he took it. I am not very well pleased; but I suppose she knows her own mind. It is to be a marriage, no doubt." He smoothed it over, but was a little put out, and stalked away without another word: he had said enough to put Jael's bosom in a flutter, and open a bright prospect to her heart; Miss Carden once disposed of in marriage, what might she not hope? She now reflected, with honest pride, that she had merited Henry's love by rare unselfishness. She had advised him loyally, had even co-operated with him as far as any poor girl, with her feelings for him, could do; and now Mr. Coventry was going to propose marriage to her rival, and she believed Miss Carden would say "yes," though she could not in her heart believe that even Miss Carden did not prefer the other. "Ay, lad," said she, "if I am to win thee, I'll be able to say I won thee fair."

These sweet thoughts and hopes soon removed her temporary anger, and nothing remained to dash the hopeful joy that warmed that large and loyal heart this afternoon, except a gentle misgiving that Mr. Coventry might make Grace a worse husband than she deserved. It was thus she read the magpie, from three o'clock till six that afternoon.

When a man and a woman do any thing wrong, it is amusing to hear the judgments of other men and women thereupon. The men all blame the man, and the women all the woman. That is judgment, is it not?

But in some cases our pitch-farthing judgments must be either heads or tails; so Mr. Raby, who had cried heads, when a Mrs. Raby would have cried "woman," was right; it was Mr. Coventry, and not Miss Carden, who leaned over to George, and whispered, "A sovereign, to drive on without her! Make some excuse."

The cunning Yorkshire groom's eye twinkled at this, and he remained passive a minute or two: then, said suddenly, with well-acted fervor, "I can't keep the pony waiting in the cold, like this;" applied the whip, and rattled off with such decision, that Grace did not like to interfere, especially as George was known to be one of those hard masters, an old servant.

So, by this little ruse, Mr. Coventry had got her all to himself for the afternoon. And now she felt sure he would propose that very day.

She made no movement whatever either to advance or to avoid the declaration.

It is five miles from Raby Hall, through Cairnhope village, to the eastern foot of Cairnhope; and while George rattles them over the hard and frosty road, I will tell the reader something about this young gentleman, who holds the winning cards.

Mr. Frederick Coventry was a man of the world. He began life with a good estate, and a large fund accumulated during his minority.

He spent all the money in learning the world at home and abroad; and, when it was all gone, he opened one eye.

But, as a man cannot see very clear with a single orb, he exchanged rouge-et-noir, etc., for the share-market, and, in other respects, lived as fast as ever, till he had mortgaged his estate rather heavily. Then he began to open both eyes.

Next, he fell in love with Grace Carden; and upon that he opened both eyes very wide, and wished very much he had his time to live over again.

Nevertheless, he was not much to be pitied. He had still an estate which, with due care, could pay off its incumbrances; and he had gathered some valuable knowledge. He knew women better than most men, and he knew whist profoundly. Above all, he had acquired what Voltaire justly calls le grand art de plaire; he had studied this art, as many women study it, and few men. Why, he even watched the countenance, and smoothed the rising bristles of those he wished to please, or did not wish to displease. This was the easier to him that he had no strong convictions on any great topic. It is your plaguey convictions that make men stubborn and disagreeable.

A character of this kind is very susceptible, either of good or evil influences; and his attachment to Grace Carden was turning him the right way.

Add to this a good figure and a distinguished air, and you have some superficial idea of the gentleman toward whom Grace Carden found herself drawn by circumstances, and not unwillingly, though not with that sacred joy and thrill which marks a genuine passion.

They left George and the trap at the "Colley Dog," and ascended the mountain. There were no serious difficulties on this side; but still there were little occasional asperities, that gave the lover an opportunity to offer his arm; and Mr. Coventry threw a graceful devotion even into this slight act of homage. He wooed her with perfect moderation at first; it was not his business to alarm her at starting; he proceeded gradually; and, by the time they had reached the summit, he had felt his way, and had every reason to hope she would accept him.

At the summit the remarkable beauty of the view threw her into raptures, and interrupted the more interesting topic on which he was bent.

But the man of the world showed no impatience (I don't say he felt none); he answered all Grace's questions, and told her what all the places were.

But, by-and-by, the atmosphere thickened suddenly in that quarter, and he then told her gently he had something to show her on the other side of the knob.

He conducted her to a shed the shepherds had erected, and seated her on a rude bench. "You must be a little tired," he said.

Then he showed her, in the valley, one of those delightful old red brick houses, with white stone facings. "That is Bollinghope."

She looked at it with polite interest.

"Do you like it?"

"Very much. It warms the landscape so."

He expected a more prosaic answer; but he took her cue. "I wish it was a great deal prettier than it is, and its owner a much better man; richer--wiser----"

"You are hard to please, Mr. Coventry."

"Miss Carden--Grace--may I call you Grace?"

"It seems to me you have done it."

"But I had no right."

"Then, of course, you will never do it again."

"I should be very unhappy if I thought that. Miss Carden, I think you know how dear you are to me, and have been ever since I first met you. I wish I had ten times more to offer you than I have. But I am only a poor gentleman, of good descent, but moderate means, as you see." Comedie! (Bollinghope was the sort of house that generally goes with £5000 a year at least.)

"I don't care about your means, Mr. Coventry," said Grace, with a lofty smile. "It is your amiable character that I esteem."

"You forgive me for loving you; for hoping that you will let me lead you to my poor house there, as my adored wife?"

It had come; and, although she knew it was coming, yet her face was dyed with blushes.

"I esteem you very much," she faltered. "I thank you for the honor you do me; but I--oh, pray, let me think what I am doing." She covered her face with her hands, and her bosom panted visibly.

Mr. Coventry loved her sincerely, and his own heart beat high at this moment. He augured well from her agitation; but presently he saw something that puzzled him, and gave a man of his experience a qualm.

A tear forced its way between her fingers; another, and another, soon followed.

Coventry said to himself, "There's some other man." And he sighed heavily; but even in this moment of true and strong feeling he was on his guard, and said nothing.

It was his wisest course. She was left to herself, and an amazing piece of female logic came to Mr. Coventry's aid. She found herself crying, and got frightened at herself. That, which would have made a man pause, had just the opposite effect on her. She felt that no good could come to any body of those wild and weak regrets that made her weep. She saw she had a weakness and a folly to cure herself of; and the cure was at hand. There was a magic in marriage; a gentleman could, somehow, make a girl love him when once she had married him. Mr. Coventry should be enabled to make her love him; he should cure her of this trick of crying; it would be the best thing for every body--for him, for Jael, for Mr. Coventry, and even for herself.

She dried her eyes, and said, in a low, tremulous voice: "Have you spoken to papa of--of this?"

"No. I waited to be authorized by you. May I speak to him?"

"Yes."

"May I tell him----?"

"Oh I can't tell you what to tell him. How dark it is getting. Please take me home." Another tear or two.

Then, if Coventry had not loved her sincerely, and also been a man of the world, he would have lost his temper; and if he had lost his temper, he would have lost the lady, for she would have seized the first fair opportunity to quarrel. But no, he took her hand gently, and set himself to comfort her. He poured out his love to her, and promised her a life of wedded happiness. He drew so delightful a picture of their wedded life, and in a voice so winning, that she began to be consoled, and her tears ceased.

"I believe you love me," she murmured; "and I esteem you sincerely."

Mr. Coventry drew a family ring from his pocket. It was a sapphire of uncommon beauty.

"This was my mother's," said he. "Will you do me the honor to wear it, as a pledge?"

But the actual fetter startled her, I think. She started up, and said, "Oh, please take me home first! It is going to snow."

Call her slippery, if you don't like her; call her unhappy and wavering, if you do like her.

Mr. Coventry smiled now at this attempt to put off the inevitable, and complied at once.

But, before they had gone a hundred yards, the snow did really fall, and so heavily that the air was darkened.

"We had better go back to the shed till it is over," said Mr. Coventry.

"Do you think so?" said Grace, doubtfully. "Well."

And they went back.

But the snow did not abate, and the air got darker. So, by-and-by, Grace suggested that Mr. Coventry should run down the hill, and send George up to her with an umbrella.

"What, and leave you alone?" said he.

"Well, then, we had better go together."

They started together.

By this time the whole ground was covered about three inches deep; not enough to impede their progress; but it had the unfortunate effect of effacing the distinct features of the ground; and, as the declining sun could no longer struggle successfully through the atmosphere, which was half air, half snow, they were almost in darkness, and soon lost their way. They kept slanting unconsciously to the left, till they got over one of the forks of the mountain and into a ravine: they managed to get out of that, and continued to descend; for the great thing they had to do was to reach the valley, no matter where.

But, after a long laborious, and even dangerous descent, they found themselves beginning to ascend. Another mountain or hill barred their progress. Then they knew they must be all wrong, and began to feel rather anxious. They wished they had stayed up on the hill.

They consulted together, and agreed to go on for the present; it might be only a small rise in the ground.

And so it proved. After a while they found themselves descending again.

But now the path was full of pitfalls, hidden by the snow and the darkness.

Mr. Coventry insisted on going first.

In this order they moved cautiously on, often stumbling.

Suddenly Mr. Coventry disappeared with a sudden plunge, and rolled down a ravine, with a loud cry.

Grace stood transfixed with terror.

Then she called to him.

There was no answer.

She called again.

A faint voice replied that he was not much hurt, and would try to get back to her.

This, however, was impossible, and all he could do was to scramble along the bottom of the ravine.

Grace kept on the high ground, and they called to each other every moment. They seemed to be a long way from each other; yet they were never sixty yards apart. At last the descent moderated, and Grace rejoined him.

Then they kept in the hollow for some time, but at last found another acclivity to mount: they toiled up it, laden with snow, yet perspiring profusely with the exertion of toiling uphill through heather clogged with heavy snow.

They reached the summit, and began to descend again. But now their hearts began to quake. Men had been lost on Cairnhope before to-day, and never found alive: and they were lost on Cairnhope; buried in the sinuosities of the mountain, and in a tremendous snowstorm.

They wandered and staggered, sick at heart; since each step might be for the worse.

They wandered and staggered, miserably; and the man began to sigh, and the woman to cry.

At last they were so exhausted, they sat down in despair: and, in a few minutes, they were a couple of snow-heaps.

Mr. Coventry was the first to see all the danger they ran by this course.

"For God's sake, let us go on!" he said; "if we once get benumbed, we are lost. We must keep moving, till help comes to us."

Then they staggered, and stumbled on again, till they both sank into a deep snow-drift.

They extricated themselves, but, oh, when they felt that deep cold snow all round them, it was a foretaste of the grave.

The sun had set, it was bitterly cold, and still the enormous flakes fell, and doubled the darkness of the night.

They staggered and stumbled on, not now with any hope of extricating themselves from the fatal mountain, but merely to keep the blood alive in their veins. And, when they were exhausted, they sat down, and soon were heaps of snow.

While they sat thus, side by side, thinking no more of love, or any other thing but this: should they ever see the sun rise, or sit by a fireside again? suddenly they heard a sound in the air behind them, and, in a moment, what seemed a pack of hounds in full cry passed close over their heads.

They uttered a loud cry.

"We are saved!" cried Grace. "Mr. Raby is hunting us with his dogs. That was the echo."

Coventry groaned. "What scent would lie?" said he. "Those hounds were in the air; a hundred strong."

Neither spoke for a moment, and then it was Grace who broke the terrible silence--

"THE GABRIEL HOUNDS!"

"The Gabriel hounds; that run before calamity! Mr. Coventry, there's nothing to be done now, but to make our peace with God. For you are a dead man, and I'm a dead woman. My poor papa! poor Mr. Little!"

She kneeled down on the snow, and prayed patiently, and prepared to deliver up her innocent soul to Him who gave it.

Not so her companion. He writhed away from death. He groaned, he sighed, he cursed, he complained. What was Raby thinking of, to let them perish?

Presently he shouted out--"I'll not die this dog's death, I will not. I'll save myself, and come back for you."

The girl prayed on, and never heeded him.

But he was already on his feet, and set off to run: and he actually did go blundering on for a furlong and more, and fell into a mountain-stream, swollen by floods, which whirled him along with it like a feather, it was not deep enough to drown him by submersion, but it rolled him over and over again, and knocked him against rocks and stones, and would infallibly have destroyed him, but that a sudden sharp turn in the current drove him, at last, against a projecting tree, which he clutched, and drew himself out with infinite difficulty. But when he tried to walk, his limbs gave way; and he sank fainting on the ground, and the remorseless snow soon covered his prostrate body.

All this time, Grace Carden was kneeling on the snow, and was, literally a heap of snow. She was patient and composed now, and felt a gentle sleep stealing over.

That sleep would have been her death.

But, all of a sudden something heavy touched her clothes, and startled her, and two dark objects passed her.

They were animals.

In a moment it darted through her mind that animals are wiser than man in some things. She got up with difficulty, for her limbs were stiffened, and followed them.

The dark forms struggled on before. They knew the ground, and soon took her to the edge of that very stream into which Coventry had fallen.

They all three went within a yard of Mr. Coventry, and still they pursued their way; and Grace hoped they were making for some shelter. She now called aloud to Mr. Coventry, thinking he must be on before her. But he had not recovered his senses.

Unfortunately, the cry startled the sheep, and they made a rush, and she could not keep up with them: she toiled, she called, she prayed for strength; but they left her behind, and she could see their very forms no more. Then she cried out in agony, and still, with that power of self-excitement, which her sex possess in an eminent degree, she struggled on and on, beyond her strength till, at last, she fell down from sheer exhaustion, and the snow fell fast upon her body.

But, even as she lay, she heard a tinkling. She took it for sheep-bells, and started up once more, and once more cried to Mr. Coventry; and this time he heard her, and shook off his deadly lethargy, and tried to hobble toward her voice.

Meantime, Grace struggled toward the sound, and lo, a light was before her, a light gleaming red and dullish in the laden atmosphere. With her remnant of life and strength, she dashed at it, and found a wall in her way. She got over it somehow, and saw the light quite close, and heard the ringing of steel on steel.

She cried out for help, for she felt herself failing. She tottered along the wall of the building, searching for a door. She found the porch. She found the church door. But by this time she was quite spent; her senses reeled; her cry was a moan.

She knocked once with her hands. She tried to knock again; but the door flew suddenly open, and, in the vain endeavor to knock again, her helpless body, like a pillar of snow, fell forward; but Henry Little caught her directly, and then she clutched him feebly, by mere instinct.

He uttered a cry of love and alarm. She opened her filmy eyes, and stared at him. Her cold neck and white cheek rested on his bare and glowing arm.

The moment he saw it was really Grace Carden that had fallen inanimate into his arms, Henry Little uttered a loud cry of love and terror, and, putting his other sinewy arm under her, carried her swiftly off to his fires, uttering little moans of fear and pity as he went; he laid her down by the fire, and darted to the forge, and blew it to a white heat; and then darted back to her, and kissed her cold hands with pretty moans of love; and then blew up the other fires; and then back to her, and patted her hands, and kissed them with all his soul, and drew them to his bosom to warm them; and drew her head to his heart to warm her; and all with pretty moans of love, and fear, and pity; and the tears rained out of his eyes at sight of her helpless condition, and the tears fell upon her brow and her hands; and all this vitality and love soon electrified her; she opened her eyes, and smiled faintly, but such a smile, and murmured, "It's you," and closed her eyes again.

Then he panted out, "Yes, it is I,--a friend. I won't hurt you--I won't tell you how I love you any more--only live! Don't give way. You shall marry who you like. You shall never be thwarted, nor worried, nor made love to again; only be brave and live; don't rob the world of the only angel that is in it. Have mercy, and live! I'll never ask more of you than that. Oh, how pale! I am frightened. Cursed fires, have you no warmth in you?" And he was at the bellows again. And the next moment back to her, imploring her, and sighing over her, and saying the wildest, sweetest, drollest things, such as only those who love can say, in moments when hearts are bursting.

How now? Her cheek that was so white is pink--pinker--red--scarlet. She is blushing.

She had closed her eyes at love's cries. Perhaps she was not altogether unwilling to hear that divine music of the heart, so long as she was not bound to reply and remonstrate--being insensible.

But now she speaks, faintly, but clearly, "Don't he frightened. I promise not to die. Pray don't cry so." Then she put out her hand to him, and turned her head away, and cried herself, gently, but plenteously.

Henry, kneeling by her, clasped the hand she lent him with both his, and drew it to his panting heart in ecstasy.

Grace's cheeks were rosy red.

They remained so a little while in silence.

Henry's heart was too full of beatitude to speak. He drew her a little nearer to the glowing fires, to revive her quite; but still kneeled by her, and clasped her hand to his heart. She felt it beat, and turned her blushing brow away, but made no resistance: she was too weak.

"Halloo!" cried a new voice, that jarred with the whole scene; and Mr. Coventry hobbled in sight. He gazed in utter amazement on the picture before him.

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