e badgered the heir of Ballawhaine, but she never did so. That
person came into his inheritance, got himself elected member for Ramsey
in the House of Keys, married Nessy Taubman, daughter of the rich
brewer, and became the father of another son. Such were the doings
in the big house down in the valley, while up in the thatched cottage
behind the water-trough, on potatoes and herrings and barley bonnag,
lived Bridget and her little Pete.

Pete's earliest recollections were of a boy who lived at the beautiful
white house with the big fuchsia, by the turn of the road over the
bridge that crossed the glen. This was Philip Christian, half a year
older than himself, although several inches shorter, with long yellow
hair and rosy cheeks, and dressed in a velvet suit of knickerbockers.
Pete worshipped him in his simple way, hung about him, fetched and
carried for him, and looked up to him as a marvel of wisdom and goodness
and pluck.

His first memory of Philip was of sleeping with him, snuggled up by his
side in the dark, hushed and still in a narrow bed with iron ends to it,
and of leaping up in the morning and laughing. Philip's father--a
tall, white gentleman, who never laughed at all, and only smiled
sometimes--had found him in the road in the evening waiting for his
mother to come home from the fields, that he might light the fire in the
cottage, and running about in the meantime to keep himself warm, and not
too hungry.

His second memory was of Philip guiding him round the drawing-room (over
thick carpets, on which his bare feet made no noise), and showing him
the pictures on the walls, and telling him what they meant. One
(an engraving of St. John, with a death's-head and a crucifix) was,
according to this grim and veracious guide, a picture of a brigand who
killed his victims, and always skinned their skulls with a cross-handled
dagger. After that his memories of Philip and himself were as two gleams
of sunshine which mingle and become one.

Philip was a great reader of noble histories. He found them, frayed
and tattered, at the bottom of a trunk that had tin corners and two
padlocks, and stood in the room looking towards the harbour where his
mother's father, the old sailor, had slept. One of them was his special
favourite, and he used to read it aloud to Pete. It told of the doings
of the Carrasdhoo men. They were a bold band of desperadoes, the terror
of all the island. Sometimes they worked in the fields at p