in, a derisive laughter. Oliver had shrunk
from the danger of the thick clubbed sticks that plied around him, and
received some strokes across the legs, for his voice rose whining, and
was drowned by shouts of, "Go to your mammy. That's Noll Leslie--all
over. Butter shins."

Randal's sallow face became scarlet. "The jest of boors--a Leslie!" he
muttered, and ground his teeth. He sprang over the stile, and walked
erect and haughtily across the ground. The players cried out
indignantly. Randal raised his hat, and they recognized him, and stopped
the game. For him at least a certain respect was felt. Oliver turned
round quickly, and ran up to him. Randal caught his arm firmly, and
without saying a word to the rest, drew him away towards the house.
Oliver cast a regretful, lingering look behind him, rubbed his shins,
and then stole a timid glance towards Randal's severe and moody
countenance.

"You are not angry that I was playing at hockey with our neighbors,"
said he deprecatingly, observing that Randal would not break the
silence.

"No," replied the elder brother; "but, in associating with his
inferiors, a gentleman still knows how to maintain his dignity. There is
no harm in playing with inferiors, but it is necessary to a gentleman to
play so that he is not the laughing-stock of clowns."

Oliver hung his head and made no answer. They came into the slovenly
precincts of the court, and the pigs stared at them from the palings, as
they had stared, years before, at Frank Hazeldean.

Mr. Leslie, senior, in a shabby straw hat, was engaged in feeding the
chickens before the threshold, and he performed even that occupation
with a maundering lack-a-daisical slothfulness, dropping down the grains
almost one by one from his inert dreamy fingers.

Randal's sister, her hair still and for ever hanging about her ears, was
seated on a rush-bottom chair, reading a tattered novel; and from the
parlor window was heard the querulous voice of Mrs. Leslie, in high
fidget and complaint.

Somehow or other, as the young heir to all this helpless poverty stood
in the courtyard, with his sharp, refined, intelligent features, and his
strange elegance of dress and aspect, one better comprehended how, left
solely to the egotism of his knowledge and his ambition, in such a
family, and without any of the sweet nameless lessons of Home, he had
grown up into such close and secret solitude of soul--how the mind had
taken so little nutriment fro