or the shabby old
clothes, or the bread and water in the lumber-room. Natural penalties
all of them, sir, which the child was beginning to pay already for the
father's sin."

Mr. Brock looked at the swarthy, secret face, still obstinately turned
away from him. "Is this the stark insensibility of a vagabond," he asked
himself, "or the despair, in disguise, of a miserable man?"

"School is my next recollection," the other went on--"a cheap place in a
lost corner of Scotland. I was left there, with a bad character to
help me at starting. I spare you the story of the master's cane in the
schoolroom, and the boys' kicks in the playground. I dare say there was
ingrained ingratitude in my nature; at any rate, I ran away. The first
person who met me asked my name. I was too young and too foolish to know
the importance of concealing it, and, as a matter of course, I was taken
back to school the same evening. The result taught me a lesson which I
have not forgotten since. In a day or two more, like the vagabond I
was, I ran away for the second time. The school watch-dog had had his
instructions, I suppose: he stopped me before I got outside the gate.
Here is his mark, among the rest, on the back of my hand. His master's
marks I can't show you; they are all on my back. Can you believe in my
perversity? There was a devil in me that no dog could worry out. I
ran away again as soon as I left my bed, and this time I got off. At
nightfall I found myself (with a pocketful of the school oatmeal) lost
on a moor. I lay down on the fine soft heather, under the lee of a
great gray rock. Do you think I felt lonely? Not I! I was away from the
master's cane, away from my schoolfellows' kicks, away from my mother,
away from my stepfather; and I lay down that night under my good friend
the rock, the happiest boy in all Scotland!"

Through the wretched childhood which that one significant circumstance
disclosed, Mr. Brock began to see dimly how little was really strange,
how little really unaccountable, in the character of the man who was now
speaking to him.

"I slept soundly," Midwinter continued, "under my friend the rock. When
I woke in the morning, I found a sturdy old man with a fiddle sitting
on one side of me, and two performing dogs on the other. Experience
had made me too sharp to tell the truth when the man put his first
questions. He didn't press them; he gave me a good breakfast out of his
knapsack, and he let me romp with the dog