.

"What was he doing with Mrs. Wood?" asked my mother anxiously.

I had not yet recovered from my own bewilderment, and was reckless of
the shock inflicted by my reply.

"_Pooring_ her head, and kissing it."

CHAPTER V.

"To each his sufferings; all are men
Condemned alike to groan.
The tender for another's pain--"
GRAY.

Not even the miser's funeral had produced in the neighbourhood anything
like the excitement which followed that Sunday evening. At first my
mother--her mind filled by the simplest form of the problem, namely,
that Mrs. Wood was in the hands of a tramp--wished my father to take the
blunderbuss in his hand and step down to the farm. He had "pish"ed and
"pshaw"ed about the blunderbuss, and was beginning to say more, when I
was dismissed to bed, where I wandered back over the moors in uneasy
dreams, and woke with the horror of a tramp's hand upon my shoulder.
After suffering the terrors of night for some time, and finding myself
no braver with my head under the bedclothes than above them, I began
conscientiously to try my mother's family recipe for "bad dreams and
being afraid in the dark." This was to "say over" the Benedicite
correctly, which (if by a rare chance one were still awake at the end)
was to be followed by a succession of the hymns one knew by heart. It
required an effort to _begin_, and to _really try_, but the children of
such mothers as ours are taught to make efforts, and once fairly
started, and holding on as a duty, it certainly did tend to divert the
mind from burglars and ghosts, to get the beasts, creeping things, and
fowls of the air into their right places in the chorus of benedictions.
That Jem never could discriminate between the "Dews and Frosts" and
"Frost and Cold" verses needs no telling. I have often finished and
still been frightened and had to fall back upon the hymns, but this
night I began to dream pleasanter dreams of Charlie's father and the
bee-master before I got to the holy and humble men of heart.

I slept long then, and Mother would not let me be awakened. When I did
open my eyes Jem was sitting at the end of the bed, dying to tell me the
news.

"Jack! you have waked, haven't you? I see your eyes. Don't shut 'em
again. What _do_ you think? _Mrs. Wood's husband has come home!_"

I never knew the ins and outs of the story very exactly. At the time
that what did become generally known was fr