pour the
luscious mixture into the open mouth waiting expectantly beside her.

"Is not that fine, Bertie boy?" she would say, patting him
affectionately upon the head; and Bert, his mouth literally too full for
utterance, would try to look the thanks he could not speak.

Maplebank had many strange visitors. It stood a little way back from the
junction of three roads, and the Squire's hospitality to wayfarers being
unbounded, the consequence was that rarely did a night pass without one
or more finding a bed in some corner of the kitchen. Sometimes it would
be a shipwrecked sailor, slowly finding his way on foot to the nearest
shipping port. Sometimes a young lad with pack on back, setting out to
seek his fortune at the capital, or in the States beyond. Again it would
be a travelling tinker, or tailor, or cobbler, plying his trade from
house to house, and thereby making an honest living.

But the most frequent visitors of all--real nuisances, though, they
often made themselves--were the poor, simple folk, of whom a number of
both sexes roamed ceaselessly about. Not far from Maplebank was what the
better class called a "straglash district"--that is, a settlement
composed of a number of people who had by constant intermarriage, and
poor living, caused insanity of a mild type to be woefully common.
Almost every family had its idiot boy or girl, and these poor creatures,
being, as a rule, perfectly harmless, were suffered to go at large, and
were generally well treated by the neighbours, upon whose kindness they
were continually trespassing.

The best known of them at the time of Bert's visit, was one called
"Crazy Colin," a strange being, half wild, half civilised, with the
frame of an athlete, and the mind of a child. Although more than thirty
years of age, he had never shown much more sense than a two-year-old
baby. He even talked in a queer gibberish, such as was suitable to that
stage of childhood. Everybody was kind to him. His clothes and his food
were given him. As for a roof, he needed none in summer save when it
stormed, and in winter he found refuge among his own people. His chief
delight was roaming the woods and fields, talking vigorously to himself
in his own language, and waving a long ash staff that was rarely out of
his hands. He would thus spend whole days in apparent content, returning
only when the pangs of hunger could be borne no longer.

Bert took a great deal of interest in these "straglash" peopl