tion was roused by the Irish
famine, and the fearful distress in other parts of the country,
to begin looking steadily and seriously at some of the sores
which were festering in its body, and undermining health and
life. And so the tide had turned, and England had already passed
the critical point; when 1848 came upon Christendom, and the
whole of Europe leapt up into a wild blaze of revolution.

Is anyone still inclined to make light of the danger that
threatened England in that year, to sneer at the 10th of April,
and the monster petition, and the monster meetings on Kennington
and other commons? Well, if there be such persons among my
readers, I can only say that they can have known nothing of what
was going on around them and below them, at that time, and I
earnestly hope that their vision has become clearer since then,
and that they are not looking with the same eyes that see
nothing, at the signs of today. For that there are questions
still to be solved by us in England, in this current
half-century, quite as likely to tear the nation to pieces as the
corn laws, no man with half an eye in his head can doubt. They
may seem little clouds like a man's hand on the horizon just now,
but they will darken the whole heaven before long, unless we can
find wisdom enough amongst us to take the little clouds in hand
in time, and make them descend in soft rain.

But such matters need not be spoken of here. All I want to do is
to put my young readers in a position to understand how it was
that our hero fell away into beliefs and notions, at which Mrs.
Grundy and all decent people could only lift up eyes and hands in
pious and respectable horror, and became, soon after the
incarceration of his friend for night poaching, little better
than a physical force Chartist at the age of twenty-one.

CHAPTER XL

HUE AND CRY

At the end of a gusty wild October afternoon, a man, leading two
horses, was marching up and down the little plot of short turf at
the top of the Hawk's Lynch. Every now and then he would stop on
the brow of the hill to look over the village, and seemed to be
waiting for somebody from that quarter. After being well blown,
he would turn to his promenade again, or go in under the clump of
firs, through which the rising south-west wind, rushing up from
the vale below, was beginning to make a moan; and, hitching the
horses to some stump or bush, and patting and coaxing them to
induce them, if so might be, to