is moment there was a prodigious clatter of hoofs on the stones,
and round the corner whirled a squadron of hussars, all in their blue
and yellow like a flight of macaws, coming to the rescue of Mr.
Henderson's sacks. But Con saw scarcely more than the first confused
onset, for somebody snatched him up and hurried him into a dark passage.
The last sight he had of the fray was of a glossy black horse plunging
frantically back from a cloud of the flour flung into his face, and
rearing higher and higher, until he fell over with a terrific scrambling
crash. Con particularly noticed the white gloves of the rider, and
thought to himself, "He's been grabbin' the flour too." And the women
about him said, "Och, murdher, the baste--the man's apt to be kilt!"

When Mrs. Duff and Con emerged again all was quiet in the street--two or
three women had even stolen back, and were scraping up the white
patches--and he was driven away on a car for what seemed to him a vast
length of time. But at last, as he peered listlessly out on glimpses of
the dreary, strange road caught between the shawled heads of two other
passengers, his eyes suddenly fell on something delightfully familiar.
It was a grey ruined mill which stood by the river, not many hundred
yards from his home. All at once he seemed to be set down in the middle
of his old life as if he had never left it, only with a charming
freshness superadded. A delicious feeling came over him as he watched
the clear, sky-glinting loops unwind themselves in the grass while the
car jogged along. There were the big stones over the edges of which the
brown water broke into dancing crests of crystal bubbles when the river
was full, and the deep pools under the hollow banks where they had seen
the trout that was the size of a young whale, and the twisted wild
cherry tree from beneath which the eddies sometimes twirled away bearing
fleets of frail, snowy petals. And Johnny and Katty and the rest might
all come into view paddling round any corner. When the car stopped at
the gap through which you got into the field just behind his cottage, he
was almost beside himself with joy, as his fellow-travellers, who were
less elated, lifted him down and handed him his bundle, and bade him
run straight in to his mother like an iligant child.

He did run down the steep little footpath at the top of his speed, and
round the corner of the house, and in through the open door. The room
looked very dusk to him comi