rk, you
might hear her caroling like a lark, flitting about the old garden
with her red setter Kerry at her heels.

Laurence no longer read aloud to him, but instead gave Flint such
books as he could find covering his particular study, and these were
devoured and pored over, and more begged for. Flint would go without
new clothes, neat as he was, and without tobacco, much as he liked to
smoke,--to buy books upon lepidoptera.

He helped my mother with her flowers and her vegetables, but refused
to have anything to do with her chickens, remarking shortly that hens
were such fools he couldn't help hating them. Madame said she liked to
have him around, for he was more like some unobtrusive jinnee than a
mere mortal. She declared that John Flint had what the negroes call a
"growing hand"--he had only to stick a bit of green in the ground and
it grew like Jonah's gourd.

Since he had begun to hobble about, he had gradually come to be
accepted by the town in general. They looked upon him as one who
shared Father De Rance's madness, a tramp who was a hunter of bugs. It
explained his presence in the Parish House; I fancy it also explained
to some why he had been a tramp!

Folks got used to him, as one does to anything one sees daily. The
pleasant conservative soft-voiced ladies who liked to call on Madame
of an afternoon and gossip Christianly, and drink tea and eat Clelie's
little cakes on our broad shady verandah, only glanced casually at the
bent head and shoulders visible through the screened window across the
garden. They said he was very interesting, of course, but painfully
shy and bashful. As for him, he was as horribly afraid of them as they
would have been of him, had they known. I could not always save
myself from the sin of smiling at an ironic situation.

Judge Mayne had at first eyed the man askance, watching him as his own
cats might an interloping stray dog.

"The fellow's not very prepossessing," he told me, of an evening when
he had dined with us, "but I've been on the bench long enough to be
skeptical of any fixed good or bad type--I've found that the criminal
type is any type that goes wrong; so I shouldn't go so far as to call
this chap a bad egg. But--I hope you are reasonably sure of him,
father?"

"Reasonably," said I, composedly.

"Laurence tells me Madame and Mary Virginia _like_ the fellow. H'm!
Well, I've acquired a little faith in the intuition of women--some
women, understand, and some ti