eless life elsewhere. She remembered that shoeing-smith well; a good
fellow, sentenced for life for a crime akin to Wat Tyler's, mercifully
reprieved from death by King George in consideration of his
provocation; for was he not, like Wat Tyler, the girl's father? She
remembered what she accounted that man's only weakness--his dwelling
with joy on the sound of the hammer-stroke of his swift, retributive
justice--the concussion of the remorseless wrought iron on the split
skull of a human beast. She remembered his words with a shudder:--"Ay,
mistress, I can shut my eyes and listen for it now. And many was the
time it gave me peace to think upon it. Ay!--in the worst of my twenty
years, the nights in the cursed river-boat they called the hulks, I
could bear them I was shut up with in the dark, and the vermin that
crawled about us, and a'most laugh to be able to hear it again, and
bless God that it sent him to Hell without time for a prayer!" The words
came back to her mind like the hideous incident of a dream we cannot for
shame repeat aloud, and made her flesh creep. But then, suppose the girl
had been her Dolly Wardle, grown big, or her own little maid, whom she
never saw again, who died near fifty years ago! Why--the sleeping face
of that baby was fresh on her lips still; had never lost its freshness
since she tore herself away to reach, at any cost, the man she loved!

Could not the sun have been content to set, without becoming a link with
a past she shrank from, so many were the evil memories that clung about
it? She was glad that someone should come into the room, to break
through this one. There was nothing in this good-humoured
villager--surely Pomona's self in a cotton print, somewhat older than is
usual with that goddess--nothing but what served to banish these
nightmares of her lonely recollection. Only, mind you, Sam Rendall--that
was Wat Tyler's name, this time--was a good man, who deserved to have
had that daughter's children on his knee. She, Maisie, had deserted
hers.

"May happen you'll call me to mind, ma'am, me and my old mother, at the
door of Strides Cottage, two days agone. I made bold to look in, hoping
to see you better." Thus Pomona, and old Maisie was grateful for the
wholesome voice. Still, she was puzzled, being unconscious that she had
seemed so ill. Pomona thought her introduction of herself had not been
clear, and repeated:--"Strides Cottage, just this side Chorlton, betwixt
Farmer Jones an