start up in the night, saying, 'That rascal's
torturing her to maintain him!' To which his wife would answer
peevishly, 'Don't 'ee raft yourself so, Ned! You prevent my getting a
bit o' rest! He won't hurt her!' and fall asleep again.

That Carry and her father had emigrated to America was the general
opinion; Mop, no doubt, finding the girl a highly desirable companion
when he had trained her to keep him by her earnings as a dancer. There,
for that matter, they may be performing in some capacity now, though he
must be an old scamp verging on threescore-and-ten, and she a woman of
four-and-forty.

May 1893,

A TRADITION OF EIGHTEEN HUNDRED AND FOUR

The widely discussed possibility of an invasion of England through a
Channel tunnel has more than once recalled old Solomon Selby's story to
my mind.

The occasion on which I numbered myself among his audience was one
evening when he was sitting in the yawning chimney-corner of the
inn-kitchen, with some others who had gathered there, and I entered for
shelter from the rain. Withdrawing the stem of his pipe from the dental
notch in which it habitually rested, he leaned back in the recess behind
him and smiled into the fire. The smile was neither mirthful nor sad,
not precisely humorous nor altogether thoughtful. We who knew him
recognized it in a moment: it was his narrative smile. Breaking off our
few desultory remarks we drew up closer, and he thus began:--

'My father, as you mid know, was a shepherd all his life, and lived out
by the Cove four miles yonder, where I was born and lived likewise, till
I moved here shortly afore I was married. The cottage that first knew me
stood on the top of the down, near the sea; there was no house within a
mile and a half of it; it was built o' purpose for the farm-shepherd, and
had no other use. They tell me that it is now pulled down, but that you
can see where it stood by the mounds of earth and a few broken bricks
that are still lying about. It was a bleak and dreary place in winter-
time, but in summer it was well enough, though the garden never came to
much, because we could not get up a good shelter for the vegetables and
currant bushes; and where there is much wind they don't thrive.

'Of all the years of my growing up the ones that bide clearest in my mind
were eighteen hundred and three, four, and five. This was for two
reasons: I had just then grown to an age when a child's eyes and ears
take in a