was about to remonstrate with them for their imprudence, when I found
out that it was the old woman who was moaning and muttering to herself."

"What is the matter with her?" asked Mrs. Hedgehog.

"I was curious to know myself," said I, "and from what I have overheard,
I think I can inform you. She is the tinker's mother, and judging from
what he said the other night, was not by any means indulgent to him when
he was a child. She is harsh enough to his young brats now; but it
appears that she was devoted to an older son, one of the children of
his first wife; and that it is for the loss of this grandchild that she
vexes herself."

"Is he dead?"

"No, my dear, but--"

"Has he been flitted?"

"Something of the kind, I fear. He has been taken to prison."

"Dear, dear!" said Mrs. Hedgehog; "what a trial to a mother's feelings!
Will they bake him?"

"I think not," said I. "I fancy that he is tethered up as a punishment
for taking what did not belong to him; and the grandmother's grievance
seems to be that she believes he was unjustly convicted. She thinks the
real robber was a gipsy. Just as if I were taken, and my skin nailed to
the keeper's door for pheasant's eggs which I had never had the pleasure
of eating."

Mrs. Hedgehog was now dying of curiosity. She said she thought the
children's spines were strong enough for anything that was likely to
happen to them; and so the next fresh damp evening we sent the seven
urchins down to the burdocks to pick snails, and crept cautiously
towards the tinker's encampment to see what we could see. And there, by
the smouldering embers of a bonfire, sat the old woman moaning, as I had
described her, with her elbows on her knees, rocking and nursing her
head, from which her long hair was looped and fell, like grey rags,
about her withered fingers.

"I don't like her looks," snorted Mrs. Hedgehog. "And how disgustingly
they have trampled the grass."

"It is quite true," said I; "it will not recover itself this summer. I
wish they had left us our wood to ourselves."

At this moment Mrs. Hedgehog laid her five toes on mine, to attract my
attention, and whispered--"Is it a gipsy?" and lifting my nose in the
direction of the rustling brushwood, I saw Sybil. There was no mistaking
her, though her cheeks looked hollower and her eyes larger than when I
saw her last.

"Good-evening, mother," she said.

The old woman raised her gaunt face with a start, and cried fiercely,
"Begone