nd Mother does get so frightened if I
am long away and she doesn't know where. But I shall come back.'

"I never quite knows, my daughter, whether it was the echo that repeated
his words, or whether it was my own voice I hears, as I stretches my old
arms after him, crying, 'Come back!'

"But he runs off shouting, 'Coming, coming!'

"And the wood deafens me, it is so full of voices.

"_Christian! Christian!--Coming! Coming!_

"And I thinks I has some kind of a fit, my daughter, for when I wakes,
the wood is as still as death, and he is gone, as dreams goes."

CHAPTER V.

"I really feel for the tinker-mother," whispered Mrs. Hedgehog.

"I feel for her myself," was my reply. "The cares of a family are heavy
enough when they only last for the season, and one sleeps them off in a
winter's nap. When--as in the case of men--they last for a lifetime, and
you never get more than one night's rest at a time, they must be almost
unendurable. As to prolonging one's anxieties from one's own families to
the families of each of one's children--no parent in his senses--"

"What is the gipsy girl saying now?" asked Mrs. Hedgehog, who had been
paying more attention to the women than to my observations--an annoyance
to which, as head of the family, I have been subjected oftener than is
becoming.

Sybil had been kneeling at the old woman's feet, soothing her and
chafing her hands. At last she said,

"But you did get him, Mother. How was it?"

"Not for five more years, my daughter. And never in all that time could
I get a sight of his face. The very first house I calls at next morning,
I sees a chalk mark on the gate-post, placed there by some travelling
tinker or pedler or what not, by which I knows that the neighbourhood is
being made too hot for tramps and vagrants, as they call us. And go back
in what disguisement I might, there was no selling a bootlace, nor
begging a crust of bread there--_there_, where _he_ lived.

"I makes up the ten pounds, and ties it in a bag; but I gets worse and
worse in health and spirits and in confusion of mind, my daughter; and
when I comes accidentally across my son in a Bedfordshire lane, and his
wife is drinking, and he is in much bewilderment with the children, I
takes up again with them, and I was with them when Christian comes to me
the second time."

"He came back to you?"

"Learning and the confinement of stone walls, my daughter, than which no
two things could be more contr