sibly the iron they contained had turned rusty and refused to act. The physician's art at best is but an experimental science: at worst it is a mere game of chance; and country folk get doctored in a way which might astound the wise, if they were not too much occupied to think about it. The medicines prescribed for Madge did not do her any harm, because she did not take them; and, possibly for the same reason, they did not do her any good. So she grew thinner every year, and, when little more than thirty, she looked almost an old woman. Country people generally age earlier than the dwellers in cities; perhaps because the conditions of their lives are on the whole less healthy, perhaps because they lack the wine of longevity, which is amusement.

Also, it happened that while the young Browns increased as fast as nature would permit the process of their production to be carried on, the business at the "Chequers" fell off. A new line of railway between Dronington and London was opened, and a station was built at about three miles from Wakefield. It did not seem to make much difference at

first. The farmers vowed they would never sit behind a tea-kettle while there was a nag in England; the waggoners and the carriers crawled along the road as usual for a month or two; but the coaches soon stopped, and in an incredibly short space of time one shame-faced bumpkin after another slunk off to the tea-kettle, and sent his produce to market by the same conveyance, till waggon and carrier's cart were seen no more.

John Giles' customers dwindled down to a few old cronies, and if his house had not been a copyhold, held at a peppercorn rent from the lord of the manor, he might have been obliged to move out of it. As it was, he and his contrived to do pretty well, though they seldom saw silver money, and now and then my lord's agent, or the squire's bailiff, as they rode through Wakefield to collect their rents, wondered that people should think themselves poor who had ten or twelve acres of garden and meadow-land round their house and a railway-station close by. But neither Giles nor Tom Brown had an idea at this time that milk and cream, and eggs and butter, with their very potatoes and cabbages, might be sent to London at a profit. Indeed, John Giles died without being any better informed. One summer afternoon he refused his beer when Madge brought it to him as usual, and an hour afterwards was found quite dead, with the brown jug untouched before him.

He was scarcely buried before the lord of the manor turned up in the shape of one Mr. Sharpe, a London lawyer, whom Madge thought she had seen before, but could not recollect where. Mr. Sharpe claimed a heriot, which was in law originally a tribute given to the lord of the manor on occasion of his engaging in a war. It consisted of military furniture, or of horses and arms, as appears by the statutes of Canute (c. 69), which still have their share in the government of Britain: for although lords of manors in England do not any longer ostensibly engage in private warfare on their own account (save for business purposes and through an attorney), and therefore do not actually, and as a matter of fact, require heer geld,

or heriot, yet with a commendable regard to their own interests, and the interests of their heirs in tail, they have scrupulously adhered to the laudable practice of claiming both heriot service and custom; the first of which is due by reservation in a grant or lease of lands, the other depends solely on immemorial usage, upheld by Wilkins, Spelman, and Blackstone. Therefore, as Mr. Sharpe acted for the trustees of Sir Richard Porteous, the feudal lord of Wakefield manor, he came diligently to search out the best horse, cow, or ox that the deceased tenant had died possessed of, and to carry off the same according to law for heriot service. Likewise he was entitled to seize by heriot custom any specific article of furniture or other valuable object on the premises. It might, and very often did happen, that the lord of a manor might take a valuable race-horse or a rich jewel worth more than his copyhold; it formed also part of his tenant's estate, and the law courts delighted exceedingly in the interminable suits arising out of such pretensions. But in the present instance Mr. Sharpe only found in the way of live stock a blind old horse and a superannuated cow, of which he chose the latter, remarking that there was no part of her carcase which was not good for something; while, with respect to other goods and chattels, the most valuable thing at the inn was Madge's large box in which she put her work. It was an oaken chest, which sounded hollow when struck, though it was apparently full; it was rather curiously carved, with a Duke's coronet engraved in brass upon the lid, and beneath it, in Old English letters, the initials "C. & R." Madge gave it up rather unwillingly, and transferred its contents to the topmost of a roomy chest of drawers; not without reflections, which had long slept in her memory. As she did so, the crumpled piece of paper which the stranger had given her fell to the ground, and she knew now, from more mature experience, that it was a ten-pound note. She looked at it long and wistfully, her countenance growing dark and dejected; but it cleared up again, as it had done on that day after her confinement, and shaking off her sombre thoughts, she wrapped up the money carefully in a stocking for good luck, putting it under lock and key. But she thought a great deal of this money. It was the largest sum she had ever seen, and it assumed an exaggerated importance in her eyes, as though it were a fortune with which something might be done, if ever the time came. "That there be William's money. It shall bide till he needs it," she said to herself, and went downstairs to cut ten hunks of bread-and-butter for her progeny.

CHAPTER III.
YOUNG BROWN.

THEY were chubby-faced urchins, with flaxen hair, rosy cheeks, and blue eyes, English peasant children, sturdy of limb and loud of roar: stolid children, who made sudden noises like the bellowing of young bulls when

they wanted anything, or were moved to joy or sorrow. They eat silently and long; they inhaled deep breaths of skimmed milk, half a pint at a time. They appeared to have almost a solemn sense of the goodness of eating, and masticated their food as if they were ruminating over the observance of a religious custom. Perhaps it is the usage of saying grace before and after meals which often gives to our peasantry that notable gravity of demeanour when eating; perhaps it is really an inward and spiritual thanksgiving for bread going on in the hearts of those who often hear how hard it is to come by.

"Wheer be ower Will, mawther ?" asked one of the boys, shyly ducking his head down and looking away while speaking, after the manner of English poor children.

William Brown's mess was the largest and daintiest, his hunk of bread was the best buttered, and his mug, marked "A fairing from Dronington,' was filled with new milk fresh from the cow, upon pretence that there was no more skimmed milk, though there was a whole panful in the dairy. But William himself was not at table.

"I knows wheer he be," cried a little girl, showing her ragged teeth from ear to ear, and sniggering as if she was being tickled.

"Wheer be he now, Madge ?" asked her mother, tying on the small damsel's pinafore more firmly round her plump freckled neck.

"Will's a been bird's-nestin' agin, and t' keeper saies there be steeltraps in Sur Richard's copses," growled a surly mite, aged six, hanging his head below his chest.

"Mawther," squeaked little Madge, "theer be our Will. He jumped over the wall and knocked daewn two lipe abbleytots," added the child, seriously.

"Tell-tale-tit,

Your tongue shall be slit,"

yelped the children in chorus, and Madge began to cry; when William Brown entered, carrying three trout wrapped up in fresh grass, and the two apricots he had shaken from their stalks as he vaulted over the garden wall.

He was an extraordinary handsome lad, not at all like his brothers and sisters. They were clumsy, thick-set louts and hoydens. He was tall and slim and straight. He towered as he walked with a firm elastic step, and his shapely head, well set upon his flat shoulders, looked round from side to side with the airy grace of a stag. He was admirably built to endure fatigue. His chest was rather deep than broad. His limbs had not an ounce of superfluous flesh upon them, and were hard as iron. He could jump farther, run faster, than any lad in the county of his age. He was nearly seventeen years old, but, like most dark persons, he looked in early youth much older than he was. He had his mother's features, the same delicately-shaped, haughty nostrils, and large purple eyes, the same full, handsome mouth, with the drooping under lip of the Wyldwyls;

but his hair was black as the raven's plume, and there was not the faintest resemblance between him and honest Tom Brown, who sat eating his supper with tranquil satisfaction in a corner of the old kitchen, where his offspring were so busy with mug and platter.

"Here, father," said William, in a clear, bold voice, and looking straight before him with the fearless glance of a young eagle, "I have brought you a brace of trout for supper, if mother will fry them for you. I have been fishing in the mill-stream with Mr. Mowledy." Indeed, Master William was generally fishing of an afternoon with the Curate, who had taught him to read and write, though he was not a very apt scholar, and had taken a deep interest in him, for reasons of which his mother only guessed the well-kept secret.

"An thee bist wi' ower parson, Willum, it be arl roight," remarked Tom Brown; "unly dunnot go fur to get into no trubble along of Sir Richard's keepers. There's that there Mr. Sharpe, I've a heerd say, him as carr'd off the dun cow, has all the hares counted and sent up to Lunnon town fur sale. It wunnut do fur to tutch a hair of their tails, Willum, boy."

"I knocked over a puss yesterday, father, with old Moody's blunderbuss, but I gave it to Ned Reeve, the under-keeper, who asked me to make a killing fly for him this month, and I did; and we are going out rabbiting with my ferrets some day," said the boy, gaily.

"I dunnot say no, Willum," answered his father, putting his hands into that shock head of hair of his according to his wont when puzzled. "Unly do 'ee give that theer lawyer Sharpe a wide berth. He's a bad 'un, that he be, Willum-leastways, no offence to you, my lad."

There was a curious and probably involuntary tone of deference in the manner of the father towards his eldest son. Tom Brown's paternal feelings were really mingled with a good deal of inarticulate astonishment that he should have begotten such a son; and he often wondered that a seven-months' child should be so straight, and tall, and strong. Sevenmonths' children, he had heard, were generally weak and sickly, whereas William could leap, standing, over a five-barred gate, handle a scythe in clover as if his lithe arms were made of the same steel as the blade of it. The boy could keep pace with the Cloudesdale hounds across country, and get in at the death of a fox without blowing an extra breath, or springing a sinew, after a burst of forty minutes over hill and valley. He could break a thorough-bred horse, and make him, riding as the crow flies, without flinching; and Ned Hieover, the Dronington dealer, was for ever trying to get hold of the boy to show his cattle well in front. He could throw a wrong-headed colt for the farrier, and Harry Jinks never felt quite at home in his forge without William, who passed much time with the blacksmith and his family, for reasons hereinafter mentioned. He could fight too, and did so freely, knocking his brothers' heads together as though they were nine pins, if the young bumpkins showed signs of impudence or insubordination, and he had lately thrashed a waggoner, six feet high and

three feet broad, with extreme skill and coolness; having taken lessons with the gloves at an early period of his existence (mirabile dictu) from Mr. Mowledy! In fact, the boy was as bold and active as a lion's whelp, which astonished lethargic Thomas his father, and filled him with a respect half comic, half touching, for this remarkable seven-months' child, who was, nevertheless, beyond doubt or question, his own offspring.

The boy promised to pay attention to his father's warning, and then the trout having been fried, and the supper over, the children trooped out into the fields; all of them gathering naturally round William Brown as the central figure of the group, They stopped at their accustomed trysting-place, which was a large duck-pond of considerable width and depth, with a weeping-willow drooping over it. There were some noble elm and oak trees growing near in a shady sylvan lane, and the birds, rejoicing in the summer, sang amidst their branches, for it still wanted two full hours of sunset. The urchins went about their games, one to his taws, the other to his sticklebacks, while William Brown leaned against a grand old oak, and taking out a clasp-knife, which the Curate had given him upon his birthday, carved a name deeply into the bark of the tree.

CHAPTER IV.

AN IDYL.

Two of his brothers, Jack and Gill, or Giles, were swinging on a gate near him, and playing at odd and even. When they tired of this pastime, says Jack to Gill,

"I wushes as 'ow 't wheer Sunday."

"Wheerfur, naew?" asked Giles.

"It be pudden-day, bain't 'un?" answered Jack, laconically; for he already felt some returns of appetite, though a glistening crumb of breadand-butter was still on his nether lip.

"Oi dunno," observed Jack dubiously. "One Sunday theer worn't no pudden; mawther she gien us goozburry-fule."

"Willie," shouted Giles, appealing to a higher tribunal, in hope and fear, "bain't Sunday pudden-day?"

"He dunno an' he doan't keer, Willum, he doan't," remarked Jack, kicking the dust up with the iron-bound toe of his stumpy little foot, as he swung his brother backwards and forwards on the gate.

"What do 'ee keer fur, Willum ?" asked Giles, slyly.

"Mother," answered the boy, slowly, "and the miller's old horse he bought of us last year."

"Then what fur beest thee allus cuttin' Sally Jinks's neam upon the trees? I've seed it on a matter o' six trees here about," said Giles, demurely.