band's father, who was
unfortunate in a matter of horse-stealing, and died across the water."

"What did _she_ want with naming the baby, mother?" asked Sybil.

"I comes to that, my daughter, I comes to that, though it's hard to
speak of. I hate myself worse than I hates the police when I thinks of
it. But ten pounds--pieces of gold, my daughter, when half-pence were
hard to come by--and small expectation that he would outlive his mother
by many days--and a feeling against him then, for her sake, though I
thinks differently now--"

"You sold him to the clergy-folks?" said Sybil.

"Ten pieces of gold! You never felt the pains of starvation, my
daughter--nor perhaps those of jealousy, which are worse. The young
clergywoman had no children, on which score she fretted herself; and
must have fretted hard, before she begged the poor tinker's child out of
the woods."

"What did Tinker George say?" asked the girl.

"He used a good deal of bad language, and said I might as easily have
got twenty pounds as ten, if I had not been as big a fool as the child's
mother herself. Men are strange creatures, my daughter."

"So you left Christian with them?"

"I did, my daughter. I left him in the arms of the young clergywoman
with the politest of words on both sides, and a good deal of religious
conversation from the parson, which I does not doubt was well meant, if
it was somewhat tedious."

"And then--mother?"

"And then we moved to Banbury, where my son took his second wife, having
made her acquaintance in an alehouse; and then, my daughter, I begins to
know that Christian's mother had been a good 'un."

"George isn't as happy with this one, then?"

"Men are curious creatures, my daughter, as you will discover for your
own part without any instructions from me. He treats her far better than
the other, because she treats him so much worse. But between them they
soon put me a-one-side, and when I sat long evenings alone, sometimes in
a wood, as it might be this, where the branches waves and makes a
confusion of the shadows--and sometimes on the edge of a Hampshire heath
where we camps a good deal, and the light is as slow in dying out of the
bottom of the sky as he and she are in coming home, and the bits of
water looks as if people had drownded themselves in them--when I sat
alone, I say, minding the fire and the children--I wondered if Christian
had lived, till I was all but mad with wondering and coming no nearer to
kno