bours'
speculations upon this point were somewhat wide of the mark, which was
not surprising, as what stray hints he did let fall could be very
deviously construed. The opinion most commonly received held that he had
"took and run off from home, and he but a gossoon, be raison of doin'
some quare bit of mischief, and had a mind yet to be keepin' out of his
people's way; though, like enough, they weren't throublin' their heads
about him be now;" a theory which was not entirely in accordance with
facts.

Con was not, I believe, an especially quare one at his first start in
life, begun under the thatch of a little whitewashed cottage, dotted
down among grass-fields beside a clear, brown river, which kept his
mother busy exhorting him and his half-dozen brethren to not be falling
in and drowning themselves on her. Her days were haunted by
apprehensions of that catastrophe, which, however, was not included in
the plot of her life's drama. Con's chosen bugbear was the bridge which
bestrode the river close by, and beneath the arch of which he had once
happened to be while a cart passed overhead. For the lumbering rumble
had been an appalling experience, which he shuddered to repeat. Yet he
lacked the moral courage to rouse his elders' derision by an avowal, so
he followed, and did not let on, whenever their wading and dabbling
brought them into the hollow-sounding shade. Despite this daily anxiety,
Con spent his earliest years light-heartedly enough, with no stinting of
pitaties--none at least that reached the childer--and ample scope for
sports and pastimes. But when he was still very small, his grandmother,
lately widowed and on her way to a new abode, stopped a night with her
married daughter, and begged that she might bring home one of the
grandchildren with her, "just to take the could edge off her
lonesomeness," a request which could not well be refused. And Con seemed
the appropriate person to go, as the old woman considered that "the dark
head of hair he had on him was the moral of his poor grandfather's afore
it turned white." Therefore the swiftly running mysteriously murmuring
river flowed away out of his life, and with it vanished all the faces
and voices and comradeship that had made up his world.

At first he fretted for them rather persistently, but after a time
adapted himself to circumstances, and contented himself with the
grass-bordered, hedge-muffled lane, which had become the scene of his
adventures, fra