the delight and thanks in his heart. He turned round and gave his mother a kiss in silent transport-a rare caress, such as meant more than words. The window of this room looked up the river, and straight into the "Brocas clump," behind which the sunset was preparing all its splendour. In the little room beyond, which was to be Dick's bedroom-glorious title!-the window looked straight across to the rafts. I do not think that any young squire coming into a fine property was ever more happy than the young tramp finding himself for almost the first time in his life in a place which he could call home. He could not stop smiling, so full of happiness was he, nor seat himself to his poor supper, but went round and round the two rooms, planning where he could put up a shelf or arrange a table. "I'll make it so handy for you, mother; you'll not know you're born!" cried Dick, in the fulness of his delight.

And yet two barer little rooms perhaps no human home ever was made in. There was nothing there that was not indispensable-a table, two chairs, and no more; and in Dick's room a small iron bed. All that his mother possessed for her own rest was a mattress, which could be rolled up and put aside during the day. She took her son's pleasure very quietly, as was her wont, but smiled with a sense of having made him happy, which was pleasant to her, although to make him happy had not been her only motive. When she had put away the things from their supper, she sat down at the open window and looked out on the river. The air was full of sound, so softened by the summer that all rudeness and harshness were taken out of it: in the foreground the ferry-boat was crossing and recrossing, the man standing up with his punt-pole against the glow of

the western sky; just under the window lay the green eyot, waving with young willows, and up and down in a continual stream on the sunny side of it went and came the boys in their boats. "Show him to me, Dick, when he comes," said the woman. Dick did not require to be told whom she meant, neither was he surprised at this intensity of interest in him, which made. his young patron the only figure worth identification in that crowded scene. Had he not been, as it were, Dick's guardian angel, who had suddenly appeared for the boy's succour?-and what more natural than that Dick's mother should desire before anything else to see one who had been such a friend to her boy?

was

But I do not think she was much the wiser when Val came down the river, accompanied by a group of backers on the bank, who had made themselves hoarse shrieking and shouting at him. He was training for a race, and this was one of his trial nights. Lichen himself had agreed to come down to give Val his advice and instructions—or, in more familiar phraseology, "coaching" him for the important effort. Dick rushed out at the sight, to cheer and shriek too, in an effervescence of loyalty which had nothing to do with the character of Val's performance. The mother sat at the window and looked out upon them, longing and sickening with a desire unsatisfied. Was this all she was ever to see of him—a distant speck in a flying boat? But to know that this was him-that he was there before her eyes-that he had taken up Dick and established him in his own train, as it were, near to him, by a sudden fancy which to her, who knew what cause there was for it, seemed something like a special interference of God,-filled her with a strange confused rapture

of mingled feelings. She let her tears fall quietly as she sat all alone, gazing upon the scene. It must be God's doing, she felt, since no man had any hand in it. She had separated them in her wild justice, rending her own heart while she did so, but God had brought them together. She was totally untaught, poor soul, in religious matters, as well as in everything else; but in her ignorance she had reached that point which our high philosophy reaches struggling through the mist, and which nowadays the unsatisfied and over-instructed mind loves to go back to, thinking itself happier with one naked primary truth than with a system however divine. No one

could have taken from this dweller in the woods and wilds the sense of a God in the world,—almost half visible, sometimes, to musing, silent souls like her own; a God always watchful, always comprehensible to the simple mind, in the mere fact of His perpetual watchfulness, fatherliness, yet severity, sending hunger and cold as well as warmth and plenty, and guiding those revolutions of the seasons and the outdoor facts of existence which impress the untaught yet thoughtful being as nothing learnt by books can ever do. To know as she did that there was a God in the world, and not believe at the same time that His interference was the most natural of all things, would have been impossible to this primitive creature. Therefore, knowing no agencies in the universe but that of man direct and visible, and that of God, which to her could scarcely be called invisible, she believed unhesitatingly that God had done this-that He had balked her, with a hand and power more great than hers. What was to be the next step she could not tell, it was beyond her she could only sit and watch how things would befall,

having not only no power but no wish to interfere.

Thus things went on for the remaining portion of the "half," which lasted only about six weeks more. Dick set himself to the work of making everything "handy" for her with enthusiasm in his odd hours, which were few-for his services at the rafts were demanded imperatively from earliest morning till the late evening after sunset, when the river dropped into darkness. "The gentlemen," it is true, were all cleared off their favourite stream by nine o'clock; but the local lovers of the Thames would linger on it during those summer nights, especially when there was a moon, till poor Dick, putting himself across in his boat when all at last was silent-the last boating party disposed of, and the small craft all ranged in their places ready for to-morrow-would feel his arms scarcely able to pull the light sculls, and his limbs trembling under him. Even then, after his long day's work, when he had eaten his supper, he would set to work to put

up

the shelves he had promised his mother, or to fix upon his walls the pictures which delighted himself. Dick began with the lowest rudiments of art, the pictures in the penny papers, with which he almost papered his walls. Then his taste advanced as his pennies grew more plentiful: the emotional prints of the Police News' ceased to charm him, and he rose to the pictures of the Illustrated,' or whatever might be the picture - paper of the time. This advance so quickly does the mind work-took place in the six weeks that remained of the half; and by the time "the gentlemen "left, and work slackened, Dick's room was already gorgeous, with here and there a mighty chromo, strong in tint and simple in subject, surrounded with all manner of royal

progresses and shows of various kinds, as represented in the columns of the prints aforesaid. He grew handy, too, in amateur carpentering, having managed to buy himself some simple tools; and when he had a spare moment he betook himself to the bits of simple carving which Ross had handed over to him, and worked at them with a real enjoyment which proved his possession of some germ at least of artistic feeling. The boy never had a moment unemployed with all these occupations, necessary and voluntary. He was as happy as the day was long, always ready with a smile and pleasant word, always sociable, not given to calculating his time too nicely, or to grumbling if some of his "mates" threw upon his willing shoulders more than his share of work. The boating people about got to know him, and among the boys he had already become highly popular. Very grand personages indeed Lichen himself, for instance, than whom there could be no more exalted being-would talk to him familiarly; and some kind lads, finding out his tastes, brought him pictures of which they themselves had got tired, and little carved brackets from their walls, and much other rubbish of this description, all of which was delightful to Dick.

As for Valentine, the effect produced upon him by the possession of a protégé was very striking. He felt the responsibility deeply, and at once began to ponder as to the duties of a superior to his inferiors, of which, of course, one time or other, he had heard much. An anxious desire to do his duty to this retainer who had been so oddly thrown upon his hands, and for whom he felt an unaccountable warmth of patronising friendship, took possession of him. He made

many trite but admirable theories on the subject-theories, however, not at all trite to Val, who believed he had invented them for his own good and that of mankind. It was not enough, he reasoned with himself, to have saved a lad from the life of a tramp, and got him regular employment, unless at the same time you did something towards improving his mind, and training him for the role of a respectable citizen. These were very fine words, but Val (strictly within himself) was not afraid of fine words. No young soul of sixteen worth anything ever is. To make a worthy citizen of his waif seemed to him for some time his mission. Having found out that Dick could read, he pondered very deeply and carefully what books to get for him, and how to lead him upon the path of knowledge. With a little sigh he recognised the fact that there was no marked literary turn in Dick's mind, and that he preferred a bit of wood and a knife as a means of relaxation to books. Val hesitated long between the profitable and the pleasant in literature as a means of educating his protégé. Whether to rouse him to the practical by accounts of machinery and manufactures, or to rouse his imagination by romance, he could not easily decide. I fear his decision was biassed ultimately by the possession of a number of books which he had himself outgrown, but which he rightly judged might do very well for his humble friend, whose total want of education made him. younger than Val by a few years, and therefore still within the range of the Headless Horseman,' of Captain Mayne Reid's vigorous productions, and other schoolboy literature of the same class. These he brought down, a few volumes at a time, to the rafts, and gave them to his friend with injunctions to read

them. "You shall have something better when you have gone through these; but I daresay you'll like them-I used to myself," said Val. Dick accepted them with devout respect; but I think the greatest pleasure he got out of them was when he ranged them in a little book-shelf he had himself made, and felt as a bibliopole does when he arranges his fine editions, that he too had a library. Dick did not care much for the stories of adventure with which Val fed him as a kind of milk for babes. He knew of adventures on the road, of bivouacs out of doors, quite enough in his Own person. But he dearly liked to see them ranged in his book-shelf. All kinds of curious instincts, half developed and unintelligible even to himself, were in Dick's mind,-the habits of a race of which he knew nothing-partially burnt out and effaced by a course of life infinitely different, yet still existing obstinately within him, and prompting him to he knew not what. If we could study human nature as we study fossils and strata, how strange it would be to trace the connection between Dick's rude book-shelves, with the coarse little ornament he had carved on them, and the pleasure it gave him to range Val's yellow volumes upon that rough shelf-and the great glorious green cabinets in Lady Eskside's drawing-room! Nobody was aware of this connection, himself least of all. And Val, who had an evident right to inherit so refined a taste, cared as little for the VernisMartin as though he had been born a savage; by such strange laws, unknown to us poor gropers after scraps of information, does inheritance go!

All this time, however, Dick's mother had not seen Val more than in his boat, for which she looked through all the sunny afternoons and

long evenings, spending half her silent intent life, so different to the outward one, so full of strange self-absorption and concentrated feeling, in the watch. This something out of herself, to attract her wandering visionary thoughts and hold her passionate heart fast, was what the woman had wanted throughout the strange existence which had been warped and twisted out of all possibility at its very outset. Her wild intolerance of confinement, her desire for freedom, her instinct of constant wandering, troubled her no more. She did her few domestic duties in the morning, made ready Dick's meals for him (and they lived with Spartan simplicity, both having been trained to eat what they could get, most often by the roadsidecold scraps of food which required no preparation), and kept his clothes and her own in order; and all the long afternoon would sit there watching for the skimming boat, the white jersey, with the distinctive mark which she soon came to recognise. I think Val's jersey had a little red cross on the breastan easy symbol to recollect. When he came down the river at last, and left his boat, she went in with a sigh, half of relief, from her watch, half of pain that it was over, and began to prepare her boy's supper. They held her whole existence thus in suspense between them; one utterly ignorant of it, the other not much better informed. When Dick came in, tired but cheery, he would show her the books Mr Ross had brought him, or report to her the words he had said. Dick adored him frankly, with a boy's pride in all his escapades; and there were few facts in Val's existence which were not known in that little house at the corner, all unconscious as he was of his importance there. One morning, however, Dick approached this unfailing subject with a little

embarrassment, looking furtively at his mother to see how far he might venture to speak.

"You don't ever touch the cards now, mother?" he said all at once, with a guilty air, which she, absorbed in her own thoughts, did not perceive.

"The cards?-I never did when I could help it, you know."

"I know," he said, "but I don't suppose there's no harm in it; it aint you as put them how they come. All you've got to do with it is saying what it means. Folks in the Bible did the same-Joseph, for one, as was carried to the land of Egypt."

The Bible was all the lore Dick had. He liked the Old Testament a great deal better than the 'Headless Horseman ;' and, like other wellinformed persons, he was glad to let his knowledge appear when there was an occasion for such exhibitions. His mother shook her head.

"It's no harm, maybe, to them that think no harm," she said; "no, it aint me that settles them-who is it? It must be either God or the devil. And God don't trouble Himself with the like of that-He has more and better to do; so it must be the devil; and I don't hold with it, unless I'm forced for a living. I can't think as it's laid to you then."

"I wish you'd just do it once to please me, mother; it couldn't do no harm."

She shook her head, but looked at him with questioning eyes.

"Suppose it was to please a gen tleman as I am more in debt to than I can ever pay-more than I want ever to pay," cried Dick, "except in doing everything to please him as long as I live. You may say it aint me as can do this, and that I'm taking it out of you; but you're all I have to help me, and it aint to save myself. Mother, it's Mr Ross as

has heard somehow how clever you are; and if you would do it just once to please him and me!"

She did not answer for a few minutes. Dick thought she was struggling with herself to overcome her repugnance. Then she replied, with an altered and agitated voice, "For him I'll do it-you can bring him to-morrow."

"How kind you are, mother!" said Dick, gratefully. "College breaks up the day after to-morrow," he added, in a dolorous voice. "I don't know what I shall do without him and all of them-the place won't look the same, nor I shan't feel the same. Mayn't he come tonight? I think he's going off tomorrow up to Scotland, as they're all talking of. Half of 'em goes up to Scotland. I wonder what kind of a place it is. Were we ever there?"

"Once-when you were quite a

child."

"'Twas there the tother little chap died?" said Dick, compassionately. "Poor mammy, I didn't mean to vex you. I wonder what he'd have been like now if he'd lived. Look here, mother, mayn't he come to-night?"

"If you like," she said, trying to seem calm, but deeply agitated by this reference. He saw this, and set it down naturally to the melancholy recollections he had evoked.

"Poor mother," he said, rising from his dinner, "you are a feelin' one! all this time, and you've never forgotten. I'll go away and leave you quiet; and just before lock-up, when it's getting dark, him and me will come across. You won't say nothing you can help that's dreadful if the cards turn up bad?-and speak as kind to him as you can, mother dear, he's been so kind to me."

Speak as kind to him as you can! What words were these to be said to her whose whole being was disturbed