naughty little ghosts in England,
Johnnie?"

Johnnie's eyes glittered like a snake's.

"We spank 'em, Johnnie. I'm going to spank you--hard."

Then Johnnie spoke.

"I'll put tha evil eye on you."

"Two if you like, my son,--or twenty if you've got 'em handy. Evil
eyes rather tickle me. We'll see which makes most impression--my hand
or your eye," and he laid the black-magic man across his knee, and
gave him such a genuine motherly quilting as he had never experienced
in his life before. Hot blows he was accustomed to, but this cool,
relentless, tingling flagellation, all on the one spot, and continued
till every particle of blood in his body seemed to leap to meet each
stroke, was new to him, and it made a great and lasting impression.

He did not cry, but tried to bite and scratch the operator, and Punch
stood looking on with a grave smile on his face and a slowly swinging
tail expressive of the greatest satisfaction.

Discipline over, Graeme handed him out through the pantry window, bade
him to go home to bed, and fastened the window behind him. The night
passed without further disturbance, and Graeme awoke as the dawn
glimmered golden on his wide-open window.

In ten minutes he was racing bareheaded past Colinette and La Forge
towards Les Laches, a towel round his neck and Punch bounding silently
by his side. They had stolen out the back way through the top of the
post-office fields, and had left Scamp still prisoner in the
woodhouse, lest the hysterical joy of his release should disturb the
ladies.

And presently they were racing back home, all aglow with the tingling
kisses of the waves, and rough of hair with the salt and the wind.

The sun was up but not yet stripped for the long day's race to the
west. The eastern skies still gleamed through a faery haze with the
soft iridescence of a young ormer shell, the tender pinks and greens
and golds of the new day's birth-chamber mellowing upwards into the
glorious blue of a day of days.

'The year's at the spring,
The day's at the morn;
Morning's at seven;
The hillside's dew-pearled:
The lark's on the wing;
The snail's on the thorn;
God's in his heaven--
All's right with the world!'

The lilt of the joyous words had often been with him as he sped
through the sleeping fields to his morning plunge.

This day of days, as though his soul forecasted what was coming, they
sang in his heart and on his lips. His cure was surel