s to be
regarded as a common purse so long as it lasted.

When Alister was appealed to, he cast in his lot with no less
willingness, but it seemed that he must first look up a relation of his
mother's, who lived in Halifax, and to whom his mother had given him a
letter of introduction. Alister had never told us his history, and of
course we had not asked for it; but on this occasion some of it crept
out. His father had been the minister of a country parish in Scotland,
but he had died young, and Alister had been reared in poverty. Dennis
and I gathered that he had well-to-do relatives on his father's side,
but, as Dennis said, "more kinship than kindness about them." "Though I
wouldn't wonder if the widow herself had a touch of stiff-neckedness in
her," he added.

However that might be, Alister held with his mother, of course, and he
said little enough about his paternal relations, except one, whom he
described as "a guid man, and _verra_ canny, but hard on the failings of
the young." What youthful failings in our comrade had helped to snap the
ties of home we did not know, but we knew enough of Alister by this time
to feel sure they could not have been very unpardonable.

It was not difficult to see that it was under the sting of this man's
reproaches that the lad had taken his fate into his own hands.

"I'm not blaming him," said Alister in impartial tones; and then he
added, with a flash of his eyes, "but I'll no be indebted to him!"

We had returned to the town, and were strolling up the shady side of one
of the clean wooden streets, when a strange figure came down it with a
swinging gait, at a leisurely pace. She (for, after a moment's
hesitation, we decided that it was a woman) was of gipsy colouring, but
not of gipsy beauty. Her black hair was in a loose knot on her back, she
wore a curious skull-cap of black cloth embroidered with beads, a short
cloth skirt, a pair of old trousers tucked into leather socks, a small
blanket with striped ends folded cunningly over her shoulders, and on
her breast a gold cross about twice as large as the one concealed
beneath the Irish boy's shirt. And I looked at her with a curious
feeling that my dreams were coming true. Dark--high-cheeked--a
blanket--and (unless the eyes with which I gazed almost reverentially at
the dirty leather socks deceived me) moccasins--she was, she must be, a
_squaw_!

Probably Dennis had come to the same conclusion, when, waving the
tabby-coloure