f this experience, he stole his way down the steep
glen-side, behind the low fence of the garden, until he reached the
bottom, and the brush-wood by the stream. Here he stopped to observe
again, and breathe, and get his spirit up. The glassy water looked as
cold as death; and if he got cramp in his feet, how could he run? And
yet he could see no other way but wading, of approaching the cottage
unperceived.

Now fortune (whose privilege it is to cast mortals into the holes that
most misfit them) sometimes, when she has got them there, takes pity,
and contemptuously lifts them. Pet was in a hole of hardship, such as
his dear mamma never could have dreamed of, and such as his nurture and
constitution made trebly disastrous for him. He had taken a chill from
his ambush, and fright, and the cold wind over the snow of the moor; and
now the long wading of that icy water might have ended upon the shores
of Acheron. However, he was just about to start upon that passage--for
the spirit of his race was up--when a dull grating sound, as of
footsteps crunching grit, came to his prettily concave ears.

At this sound Lancelot Carnaby stopped from his rash venture into the
water, and drew himself back into an ivied bush, which served as the
finial of the little garden hedge. Peeping through this, he could see
that the walk from the cottage to the hedge was newly sprinkled with
gray wood ash, perhaps to prevent the rain from lodging and the snow
from lying there. Heavy steps of two old men (as Pet in the insolence
of young days called them) fell upon the dull soft crust, and ground
it, heel and toe--heel first, as stiff joints have it--with the bruising
snip a hungry cow makes, grazing wiry grasses. "One of them must be
Insie's dad," said Pet to himself, as he crouched more closely behind
the hedge; "which of them, I wonder? Well, the tall one, I suppose, to
go by the height of that Maunder. And the other has only one arm; and a
man with one arm could never have built their house. They are coming to
sit on that bench; I shall hear every word they say, and learn some
of their secrets that I never could get out of Insie one bit of. But I
wonder who that other fellow is?"

That other fellow, in spite of his lease, would promptly have laid his
surviving hand to the ear of Master Lancelot, or any other eavesdropper;
for a sturdy and resolute man was he, being no less than our ancient
friend and old soldier, Jack of the Smithies. And now wa