of surprises and conflicts, adventures at inns, alarms at midnight,
windings of a horn over hilly verges of black heaths, and the rape of
the child, the pursuit, the recovery of the child, after a new set of
heroine performances on the part of a strung-wire mother, whose outcry
in a waste country district, as she clasps her boy to her bosom again:
'There's a farm I see for milk for him!' the Dame repeats, having
begun with an admission that the tale has been contradicted, and is not
produced on authority. The end in design is to win the ear by making a
fuss, and roll event upon event for the braining of common intelligence,
until her narrative resembles dusty troopings along a road to the races.

Carinthia and her babe reached Esslemont, no matter what impediments.
There, like a stopped runner whose pantings lengthen to the longer
breath, her alarms over the infant subsided, ceasing for as long as
she clasped it or was in the room with it. Walking behind the precious
donkey-basket round the park, she went armed, and she soon won a fearful
name at Kentish cottage-hearths, though she 'was not black to see, nor
old. No, she was very young. But she did all the things that soldiers
do,--was a bit of a foreigner;--she brought a reputation up from the
Welsh land, and it had a raven's croak and a glow-worm's drapery and a
goblin's origin.

Something was hinted of her having agitated London once. Somebody
dropped word of her and that old Lord Levellier up at Croridge. She
stalked park and country at night. Stories, one or two near the truth,
were told of a restless and a very decided lady down these parts as
well; and the earl her husband daren't come nigh in his dread of her, so
that he runs as if to save his life out of every place she enters. And
he's not one to run for a trifle. His pride is pretty well a match for
princes and princesses.

All the same, he shakes in his shoes before her, durst hardly spy at
Esslemont again while she's in occupation. His managing gentleman comes
down from him, and goes up from her; that's how they communicate. One
week she's quite solitary; another week the house is brimful as can be.
She 's the great lady entertaining then. Yet they say it 's a fact,
she has not a shilling of her own to fling at a beggar. She 'll stock
a cottage wanting it with provision for a fortnight or more, and she'll
order the doctor in, and she'll call and see the right things done for
illness. 'But no money; no on