un! On with thee! Over ye go! Oo--ooray!"

It was this last prolonged cheer which drowned the sound of footsteps on
the path behind him, so that if he had been a tumbler pigeon himself he
could not have jumped more nimbly when a man's hand fell upon his
shoulder. Up went his arms to shield his ears from a well-merited
cuffing; but fate was kinder to him than he deserved. It was only an old
man (prematurely aged with drink and consequent poverty), whose faded
eyes seemed to rekindle as he also gazed after the pigeons, and spoke as
one who knows.

"Yon's Daddy Darwin's Tumblers."

This old pauper had only lately come into "the House" (the house that
never was a home!), and the boy clung eagerly to his flannel sleeve, and
plied him thick and fast with questions about the world without the
workhouse-walls, and about the happy owner of those yet happier
creatures who were free not only on the earth, but in the skies.

The poor old pauper was quite as willing to talk as the boy was to
listen. It restored some of that self-respect which we lose under the
consequences of our follies to be able to say that Daddy Darwin and he
had been mates together, and had had pigeon-fancying in common "many a
long year afore" he came into the House.

And so these two made friendship over such matters as will bring man and
boy together to the end of time. And the old pauper waxed eloquent on
the feats of Homing Birds and Tumblers, and on the points of Almonds and
Barbs, Fantails and Pouters; sprinkling his narrative also with high
sounding and heterogeneous titles, such as Dragons and Archangels, Blue
Owls and Black Priests, Jacobines, English Horsemen and Trumpeters. And
through much boasting of the high stakes he had had on this and that
pigeon-match then, and not a few bitter complaints of the harsh
hospitality of the House he "had come to" now, it never seemed to occur
to him to connect the two, or to warn the lad who hung upon his lips
that one cannot eat his cake with the rash appetites of youth, and yet
hope to have it for the support and nourishment of his old age.

The longest story the old man told was of a "bit of a trip" he had made
to Liverpool, to see some Antwerp Carriers flown from thence to Ghent,
and he fixed the date of this by remembering that his twin sons were
born in his absence, and that though their birthday was the very day of
the race, his "missus turned stoopid," as women (he warned the boy) are
apt to do, and