d seen it, I didn't feel to know how it
might be with foundlings, and--"

But still Miss Betty did not touch the bairn. She was not accustomed to
children. But the parson had christened too many babies to be afraid of
them, and he picked up the little fellow in a moment, and tucked the
yellow rag round him, and then addressing the little ladies precisely as
if they were sponsors, he asked in his deep round voice, "Now where on
the face of the earth are the vagabonds who have deserted this child?"

The little ladies did not know, the broom bushes were silent, and the
question has remained unanswered from that day to this.

There were no railways near Lingborough at this time. The coach ran
three times a week, and a walking postman brought the letters from the
town to the small hamlets. Telegraph wires were unknown, and yet news
travelled quite as fast then as it does now, and in the course of the
following morning all the neighbourhood knew that Miss Betty had found a
baby under a broom bush, and the lawyer called in the afternoon to
inquire how the ladies found themselves after the tea party at Mrs.
General Dunmaw's.

Miss Kitty was glad on the whole. She felt nervous, but ready for a
renewal of hostilities. Several clinching arguments had occurred to her
in bed last night, and after hastily looking up a few lines from her
common-place book, which always made her cry when she read them, but
which she hoped to be able to hurl at the lawyer with a steady voice,
she followed Miss Betty to the drawing-room.

It was half a relief and half a disappointment to find that the lawyer
was quite indifferent to the subject of their late contest. He
overflowed with compliments; was quite sure he must have had the worst
of the argument, and positively dying of curiosity to hear about the
baby.

The little ladies were very full of the subject themselves. An active
search for the baby's relations, conducted by the parson, the clerk,
the farm-bailiff, the constable, the cowherd, and several
supernumeraries, had so far proved quite vain. The country folk were
most anxious to assist, especially by word of mouth. Except a small but
sturdy number who had seen nothing, they had all seen "tramps," but
unluckily no two could be got together whose accounts of the tramps
themselves, of the hour at which they were seen, or of the direction in
which they went, would tally with each other.

The little ladies were quite alive to the possibili