s old horse, which, either from compassion or indifference, had not
cared to rise up under the burden. They said likewise that, when accused
by Scroggie of housebreaking, though nothing had to be broken to get in,
only a string with a peculiar knot, on the invention of which the
cadger prided himself, to be undone, all that Shargar had to say in his
self-defence was, that he had a terrible sair wame, and that the horse
was warmer nor the stanes i' the yard; and he had dune him nae ill, nae
even drawn a hair frae his tail--which would have been a difficult feat,
seeing the horse's tail was as bare as his hoof.

CHAPTER VII. ROBERT TO THE RESCUE!

That Shargar was a parish scholar--which means that the parish paid his
fees, although, indeed, they were hardly worth paying--made very little
difference to his position amongst his school-fellows. Nor did the
fact of his being ragged and dirty affect his social reception to his
discomfort. But the accumulated facts of the oddity of his personal
appearance, his supposed imbecility, and the bad character borne by his
mother, placed him in a very unenviable relation to the tyrannical and
vulgar-minded amongst them. Concerning his person, he was long, and,
as his name implied, lean, with pale-red hair, reddish eyes, no visible
eyebrows or eyelashes, and very pale face--in fact, he was half-way to
an Albino. His arms and legs seemed of equal length, both exceedingly
long. The handsomeness of his mother appeared only in his nose and
mouth, which were regular and good, though expressionless; and the birth
of his father only in his small delicate hands and feet, of which any
girl who cared only for smallness, and heeded neither character nor
strength, might have been proud. His feet, however, were supposed to be
enormous, from the difficulty with which he dragged after him the huge
shoes in which in winter they were generally encased.

The imbecility, like the large feet, was only imputed. He certainly was
not brilliant, but neither did he make a fool of himself in any of
the few branches of learning of which the parish-scholar came in for a
share. That which gained him the imputation was the fact that his nature
was without a particle of the aggressive, and all its defensive of as
purely negative a character as was possible. Had he been a dog, he
would never have thought of doing anything for his own protection beyond
turning up his four legs in silent appeal to the mercy of t