an earthly home--in Daddy Darwin's Dovecot.

SCENE III.

Two and two, girls and boys, the young lady's guests marched down to the
Vicarage. The school-mistress was anxious that each should carry his and
her tin mug, so as to give as little trouble as possible; but this was
resolutely declined, much to the children's satisfaction, who had their
walk with free hands, and their tea out of teacups and saucers, like
anybody else.

It was a fine day, and all went well. The children enjoyed themselves,
and behaved admirably into the bargain. There was only one suspicion of
misconduct, and the matter was so far from clear that the parson's
daughter hushed it up, and, so to speak, dismissed the case.

The children were playing at some game in which Jack March was supposed
to excel, but when they came to look for him he could nowhere be found.
At last he was discovered, high up among the branches of an old
walnut-tree at the top of the field, and though his hands were unstained
and his pockets empty, the gardener, who had been the first to spy him,
now loudly denounced him as an ungrateful young thief. Jack, with
swollen eyes and cheeks besmirched with angry tears, was vehemently
declaring that he had only climbed the tree to "have a look at Master
Darwin's pigeons," and had not picked so much as a leaf, let alone a
walnut; and the gardener, "shaking the truth out of him" by the collar
of his fustian jacket, was preaching loudly on the sin of adding
falsehood to theft, when the parson's daughter came up, and, in the end,
acquitted poor Jack, and gave him leave to amuse himself as he pleased.

It did not please Jack to play with his comrades just then. Pie felt
sulky and aggrieved. He would have liked to play with the terrier who
had stood by him in his troubles, and barked at the gardener; but that
little friend now trotted after his mistress, who had gone to
choir-practice.

Jack wandered about among the shrubberies. By-and-by he heard sounds of
music, and led by these he came to a gate in a wall, dividing the
Vicarage garden from the churchyard. Jack loved music, and the organ and
the voices drew him on till he reached the church porch; but there he
was startled by a voice that was not only not the voice of song, but was
the utterance of a moan so doleful that it seemed the outpouring of all
his lonely, and outcast, and injured feelings in one comprehensive howl.

It was the voice of the silver-haired terrier. He w