provoke from the rough hand of his sturdy elder brother, rendered the change hazardous; and the poor clerk was consequently obliged to solicit for the boy who had been so tenderly recommended to him on her deathbed by his unfortunate wife, the continued harbour of his sister and brother-in-law. Till ten years old, therefore, Luke remained at Norcroft, doing errands about his uncle's farm, and scouted as a poor relation by all the family except a little girl named Esther, a year younger than himself, who comforted him, by her overweening affection, for his troubles, past, present, or to come.

The first great trouble, however, of which he was conscious, was his final banishment from Norcroft. After a time, matters went ill with the Harmans. They were forced to give up the greater portion of the land they rented from a less indulgent landlord than Sir Clement Colston; and get rid of their supernumerary labourers and sickly nephew. Willingly would Downing have paid for the keep of his boy. But, as it sometimes occurs

in a higher walk of life, his kinsfolk were too proud to receive money for what they were too poor to give for nothing; and Luke was transferred back to Hartington, to receive from his father those rudiments of learning which Downing, as became a parish clerk, assured him were better than house or land.

He had enforced the same axiom upon Jack. But the bolder boy dissented in toto. Because neither house nor land was to be his portion, why was he forced to accept a hornbook in their stead? He would not learn. Nothing and nobody could make him learn; not even his father, who wasted both argument and coercion in the attempt. Jack was thrashed and Jack was lectured: but he still persisted in believing that bird-nesting and wiring hares, rather than A B C, were the only pleasant substitute for lands and houses.

It is true the situation of Downing's cottage on the verge of Warling Wood was peculiarly propitious to the development of this opinion. The wood was such a capital covert for his

truancies! There, Jack was able, at all seasons, to defy his father's researches. He knew every tree and every step of it; besides bypaths and even runs through the underwood, made by the beasts of the field, but not the less available to the urchins of the village. The wood was in fact the natural home of Jack.

A savage wildness round him hung,

As of a dweller out of doors;

for the avocation of his father rendering it impossible for him to be followed in the discharge of his duties by an ill-conditioned boy of fourteen, lacking the exterior decency indispensable to even the most minor of minor ministrants to the clerical calling, there were many hours of the day in which Jack Downing had every excuse for slinking along the brook-side, watching his opportunity (as his enemies averred) for tickling the trout of the preserved stream, or stealing off into the wood in search of squirrels' nests. For these purposes, the clerk's cottage was favourably situated; in the midst of a patch of garden

ground at the bottom of Church Lane, divided from the stream only by a margent of short, green turf, dotted with straggling alder bushes,—a margent widening here and there almost into a little valley, still shrubby and still verdant, for nearly a mile, till it entered at one extremity the precincts of Hartington Park, and at the other afforded a short cut to the nearest market-town. Sloping upward from this riband of velvet-like herbage commenced the limits of Warling Wood; and Jack Downing had consequently a safe covert for his double depredations.

It was just when his father's indignation was at the hottest against him, in consequence of a domiciliary visit made to the cottage by Sir Clement's keepers, accompanied by the constable, to search for a brace of trout which had been seen thrust into a basket of grass by Master Jack, in the twilight of a fine midsummer morning on the banks of the stream, (known in the village by the name of the Hams) and of which nothing was found but the basket filled with grass and the fishy odour

left behind them, that Luke was despatched home from Norcroft, to profit by the admonitions against picking and stealing bestowed upon his elder brother.

The moment was unlucky for the boy's inauguration at the cottage. The sudden change from a household governed by the experienced hand of his aunt and the gentle tendance of Esther, to a spot lacking all aid of womanly housewifery, was far from pleasant. He did not feel at home there; he could not feel at home there; and, when forced to become a witness of the furious altercations between his father and brother, his gentle nature shrank, as if touched with a hot iron. The very names he heard applied to his brother were new to his ear. But more abhorrent still were those which Jack soon began to apply to himself,—as a poor, pitiful, sneaking urchin, who, after eating beggar's bread at his uncle's table, was returned as worthless on the hands of his father. To the young ruffian of Warling Wood, the poor boy seemed an instinctive object of hatred. Luke