ck out of "Pebbly Brook," the little stream which ran through
the village. The first stickleback was a splendid fellow, with fabulous
red and blue gills. Tom kept him in a small basin till the day of his
death, and became a fisherman from that day. Within a month from the
taking of the first stickleback, Benjy had carried off our hero to
the canal, in defiance of Charity; and between them, after a whole
afternoon's popjoying, they had caught three or four small, coarse fish
and a perch, averaging perhaps two and a half ounces each, which Tom
bore home in rapture to his mother as a precious gift, and which she
received like a true mother with equal rapture, instructing the cook
nevertheless, in a private interview, not to prepare the same for the
Squire's dinner. Charity had appealed against old Benjy in the meantime,
representing the dangers of the canal banks; but Mrs. Brown, seeing the
boy's inaptitude for female guidance, had decided in Benjy's favour, and
from thenceforth the old man was Tom's dry nurse. And as they sat by the
canal watching their little green-and-white float, Benjy would instruct
him in the doings of deceased Browns. How his grandfather, in the early
days of the great war, when there was much distress and crime in the
Vale, and the magistrates had been threatened by the mob, had ridden in
with a big stick in his hand, and held the petty sessions by himself.
How his great-uncle, the rector, had encountered and laid the last
ghost, who had frightened the old women, male and female, of the
parish out of their senses, and who turned out to be the blacksmith's
apprentice disguised in drink and a white sheet. It was Benjy, too,
who saddled Tom's first pony, and instructed him in the mysteries of
horsemanship, teaching him to throw his weight back and keep his hand
low, and who stood chuckling outside the door of the girls' school when
Tom rode his little Shetland into the cottage and round the table, where
the old dame and her pupils were seated at their work.

Benjy himself was come of a family distinguished in the Vale for their
prowess in all athletic games. Some half-dozen of his brothers and
kinsmen had gone to the wars, of whom only one had survived to come
home, with a small pension, and three bullets in different parts of his
body; he had shared Benjy's cottage till his death, and had left him his
old dragoon's sword and pistol, which hung over the mantelpiece, flanked
by a pair of heavy single-st