ung with slate, its eight ridges faced with Bath stone,
and edged from top to bottom with ornamental crockets.

The service over, bride and bridegroom withdrew with their friends to
the vestry for the signing of the register; and there, while they
dallied and interchanged good wishes, were interrupted by the beadle,
a white-faced pew-opener, and two draymen from the street, with news
(as one of the draymen put it, shouting down the rest) that "one of
Scougall's yellow orphans was up clinging to the weathercock by his
blessed eyebrows; and was this a time for joking, or for feeling
ashamed of themselves and sending for a constable?"

The drayman shouted and gesticulated so fiercely with a great hand
flung aloft that Mr. Scougall, almost before comprehending,
precipitated himself from the church. Outside stood his hired
carriage with its pair of greys, but the driver was pointing with his
whip and craning his neck like the rest of the small crowd.

It may have been their outcries, but I believe it was the ringing of
the dockyard bell for the dinner-hour, which awoke me. In my dreams
my arms had been about some kindly neck (and of my dreams in those
days, though but a glimpse ever survived the waking, in those
glimpses dwelt the shade, if not the presence, of my unknown mother).
They were, in fact, clasped around the leg of the weathercock.
Unsympathetic support! But I have known worse friends. A mercy it
was, at any rate, that I kept my embrace during the moments when
sense returned to me, with vision of the wonders spread around and
below. Truly I enjoyed a wonderful view--across the roofs of
Plymouth, quivering under the noon sun, and away to the violet hills
of Dartmoor; and, again, across the water and shipping of the Hamoaze
to the green slopes of Mount Edgcumbe and the massed trees slumbering
in the heat. Slumber, indeed, and a great quiet seemed to rest over
me, over the houses, the ships, the whole wide land. By the blessing
of Heaven, not so much as the faintest breeze played about the spire,
or cooled the copper rod burning my hand (and, again, it may have
been this that woke me). I sat astride the topmost crocket, and
glancing down between my boot heels, spied the carriage with its pair
of greys flattened upon the roadway just beyond the verge of the
battlements, and Mr. Scougall himself dancing and waving his arms
like a small but very lively beetle.

Doubtless, I had ascended by the narrow stairwa