was danger of erysipelas setting in.

The boy could not be found for some time, but a neighbour, observing a
stone come from nowhere in particular and hit a cat, located the first
cause in a ditch. He brought the boy home, and grabbed his father just
in time to prevent murder being done.

It was soon found that the only thing which eased the restless moaning
woman was the touch of her son. All her unmanageable, delirious
thoughts centred on him--

"Sure he's only a boy; beating never did good to anything. Give him a
chance now for wouldn't a child be a bit wild anyhow. You will be a
good boy, won't you? Come to your mother, my lamb."

So the lad grew, from twelve to fifteen, from fifteen to twenty. Soon
he attained to manhood. To his mother he seemed to have leaped in a
day from the careless, prattling babe to the responsibly-whiskered
miracle at whom mothers sit and laugh in secret delight. This
towering, big-footed, hairy person! was he really the little boy who
used to hide in her skirts when his father scowled? She had only to
close her eyes and she could feel again a pair of little hands clawing
at her breast, sore from the violent industry of soft, wee lips.

So he grew. Breeches that were big became small. Bony wrists were
continually pushing out of coat cuffs. His feet would burst out of his
boots. He grew out of everything but one. A man may outgrow his
breeches, he cannot outgrow his nature: his body is never too big or
too small to hold that.

Every living thing in the neighbourhood knew him. When a cat saw him
coming it climbed a tree and tried to look as much like a lump of wood
as it could. When a dog heard his step it tucked its tail out of sight
and sought for a hole in the hedge. The birds knew he carried stones
in his pockets. No tree cast so black a shadow in the sunlight as he
did. There were stories of a bottle of paraffin oil and a cat that
screeched in flames. Folk told of a maltreated dog that pointed its
nose to heaven and bayed a curse against humanity until a terrified man
battered it to death with a shovel. No one knew who did it, but every
one said there were only two living hearts capable of these
iniquities--one belonged to the devil, the other to our young man, and
they acquitted Satan of the deeds.

The owner of the dog swore by the beasts in the field and the stars in
the sky that he would tear the throat of the man who had injured his
beast.

The father drove his one-eyed wif