flagration?
He looked at one, and at the other, with a strange, fixed stare, as he
wrote--not keeping his eyes on the paper, as Lenny had been taught to do
when he sat down to his copybook. The fact is, that Randal Leslie was
tired and faint, and he felt the shock of his fall the more, after the
few paces he had walked, so that he was glad to rest himself a few
moments; and he took that opportunity to write a line to Frank, to
excuse himself for not calling again, intending to tear the leaf on
which he wrote out of his pocketbook, and leave it at the first cottage
he passed, with instructions to take it to the Hall.

While Randal was thus innocently engaged, Lenny came up to him with the
firm and measured pace of one who has resolved, cost what it may, to do
his duty. And as Lenny, though brave, was not ferocious, so the anger he
felt, and the suspicions he entertained, only exhibited themselves in
the following solemn appeal to the offender's sense of propriety,--

"Ben't you ashamed of yourself? Sitting on the Squire's new stocks! Do
get up, and go along with you!"

Randal turned round sharply; and though, at any other moment, he would
have had sense enough to extricate himself very easily from his false
position, yet, _Nemo mortalium_, &c. No one is always wise. And Randal
was in an exceedingly bad humor. The affability towards his inferiors,
for which I lately praised him, was entirely lost in the contempt for
impertinent snobs natural to an insulted Etonian.

Therefore, eyeing Lenny with great disdain, Randal answered briefly,--

"You are an insolent young blackguard."

So curt a rejoinder made Lenny's blood fly to his face. Persuaded before
that the intruder was some lawless apprentice or shop lad, he was now
more confirmed in that judgment, not only by language so uncivil, but by
the truculent glance which accompanied it, and which certainly did not
derive any imposing dignity from the mutilated, rakish, hang-dog,
ruinous hat, under which it shot its sullen and menacing fire.

Of all the various articles of which our male attire is composed, there
is perhaps not one which has so much character and expression as the
top-covering. A neat, well-brushed, short-napped, gentlemanlike hat, put
on with a certain air, gives a distinction and respectability to the
whole exterior; whereas, a broken, squashed, higgledy-piggledy sort of a
hat, such as Randal Leslie had on, would go far towards transforming the
statelie