m, turned homewards, fairly
cowed, and pursued us no more. But, alas! on reaching our secret
chamber, we ascertained, by marks all too unequivocal, that it was to be
secret no longer. Some rude hand had torn down the wooden lining, and
cut two of the posts half through with a hatchet; and on returning
disconsolately to the town, we ascertained that Johnstone the forester
had just been there before us, declaring that some atrociously wicked
persons--for whose apprehension a proclamation was to be instantly
issued--had contrived a diabolical trap, which he had just discovered,
for maiming the cattle of the gentleman, his employer, who farmed the
Hill. Johnstone was an old Forty-Second man, who had followed Wellington
over the larger part of the Peninsula; but though he had witnessed the
storming and sack of San Sebastian, and a great many other bad things,
nothing had he ever seen on the Peninsula, or anywhere else, he said,
half so mischievous as the cattle-trap. We, of course, kept our own
secret; and as we all returned under the cloud of night, and with heavy
hearts filled up our excavation level with the soil, the threatened
proclamation was never issued. Johnstone, however--who had been watching
my motions for a considerable time before, and whom, as he was a
formidable fellow, very unlike any of the other foresters, I had been
sedulously watching in turn--had no hesitation in declaring that I, and
I only, could be the designer of the cattle-trap. I had acquainted
myself in books, he said, with the mode of entrapping by pitfalls wild
beasts in the forests abroad; and my trap for the Colonel's cattle was,
he was certain, a result of my book-acquired knowledge.

I was one day lounging in front of my mother's dwelling, when up came
Johnstone to address me. As the evidence regarding the excavation had
totally broken down, I was aware of no special offence at the time that
could have secured for me such a piece of attention, and inferred that
the old soldier was labouring under some mistake; but Johnstone's
address soon evinced that he was not in the least mistaken. "He wished
to be acquainted with me," he said. "It was all nonsense for us to be
bothering one another, when we had no cause to quarrel." He used
occasionally to eke out his pension, and his scanty allowance as
forester, by catching a basket of fish for himself from off the rocks of
the Hill; and he had just discovered a projecting rock at the foot of a
tall p