h such bright hopes and such careless confidence?
Ah, if some of them could have seen whither that flower-strewn path was
to lead them, would they not rather have chosen even to die on the
threshold, than take so much as the first step forth from the innocent
home of childhood!

But I am wandering from my story. For half an hour after that last
good-bye Charlie leaned back in the corner of his carriage and gave
himself up to his loneliness, and I could feel his chest heaving to keep
down the tears that would every now and then rise unbidden to his eyes.

But what boy of thirteen can be in the dumps for long? Especially if he
has a new watch in his pocket. Charlie was himself again before we had
well got clear of London, and his reviving spirits gradually recalled to
his memory his father's parting gift, which had for a while been half
forgotten amid other cares.

Now again I was produced, I was turned over and over, was listened to,
was peeped into, was flourished about, was taken off my chain, and put
on again with the supremest satisfaction. At every station we came to,
out I came from his pocket, to be compared with the railway time. By
the clock at Batfield I was a minute slow--a discrepancy which was no
sooner discovered than I felt my glass face opened, and a fat finger and
thumb putting forward my hand to the required time. At Norbely I was
two minutes fast by the clock, and then (oh, horrors!) I found myself
put back in the same rough-and-ready way. At Maltby I was full half a
minute behind the great clock, and on I went again. At the next station
the clock and I both gave the same time to a second, and then what must
he do but begin to regulate me! After a minute calculation he made the
astounding discovery that I had lost a minute and a quarter in four
hours, and that in order to compensate for this shortcoming it would be
necessary for him to move my regulator forward the two hundred and
fortieth part of an inch. This feat he set himself to accomplish with
the point of his scarf-pin while the train was jolting forward at the
rate of thirty miles an hour!

I began to grow nervous. If this was a sample of what I was to expect,
I had indeed need be the healthy, hardy watch I was represented to be by
my maker.

And yet I could not be angry with my brave, honest little tormentor.

It was a sight to see him during that long journey, in all the glory of
a new suit, with a high hat on his head for t