anquilly, his mouth full of raw turnip.

"Then you ought to want to go back to it."

"I mean to, one of these fine days."

"I shouldn't put it off too long, if I were you," advised Linnet,
candidly. "You're getting up in years, and the next thing you'll be
dead."

"But didn't your father ever want to go back?" asked Matthew Henry,
sticking to his point.

"No fear."

"Why?"

"Because, if he'd showed his face back in Cornwall, they'd have hanged
him; that's all."

"Oh!" exclaimed the three, almost simultaneously, and sat for a moment
or two gazing on Jan in awed silence.

"But why should they want to hang your father?" asked Annet.

Jan sliced his bread with an air of noble indifference. "Eh? Why,
indeed? He used to say 'twas for being too frolicsome. He never done no
wrong--not what you might call wrong: or so he maintained, an' 'twasn't
for me to disbelieve 'en. Was it, now?"

"You'll tell us about it, Jan dear?" coaxed Annet.

"There's no particular story in it." (The children put this aside; it
was Jan's formula for starting a tale.) "My father, in his young days,
lived at a place in Cornwall called Luxulyan, and arned his wages as a
tinner at a stream-work----"

"What is a stream-work?" asked Matthew Henry.

"A stream-work is a moor beside a river, where the mud is full of ore,
washed down from the country above--sometimes from the old mines. The
streamers dig this mud up and wash it through sieves, and so they get
the tin. There was enough of it, my father said, in Luxulyan Couse to
keep a captain and twelve men in good wages and pay for a feast once a
year at the Rising Sun Public House. The supper took place some time in
the week before Christmas, and they called it Pie-crust Night, though I
can't tell you why. Well, one Pie-crust Night, after this yearly
supper--the most enjoyable he had ever known--my father left the Rising
Sun towards midnight, and started to walk to his home in Luxulyan
Churchtown. He had a fair dollop of beer inside of him, but nothing (as
he ever maintained), to excuse what followed, and he got so far as
Tregarden Down without accident. Now, this Tregarden Down, as he always
described it to me, is a lonesome place given over to brackenfern and
strewn about with great granite boulders, and on one of these boulders
my father sat down, because the night was clear and a fancy had come
into his head to count the stars. He sat there staring up and counting
till he reached twenty