so," he once said. And that explained
his attitude toward them, and consequently theirs toward him.

He stood entirely alone; a son of Hagar, mocking. His sharp, ill tongue
was rarely still, and always bitter. There was hardly a man in the land,
from Langholm How to the market-cross in Grammoch-town, but had at
one time known its sting, endured it in silence--for they are slow of
speech, these men of the fells and meres--and was nursing his resentment
till a day should bring that chance which always comes. And when at
the Sylvester Arms, on one of those rare occasions when M'Adam was not
present, Tammas summed up the little man in that historic phrase of his,
"When he's drunk he's wi'lent, and when he bain't he's wicious," there
was an applause to gratify the blase heart of even Tammas Thornton.

Yet it had not been till his wife's death that the little man had
allowed loose rein to his ill-nature. With her firmly gentle hand no
longer on the tiller of his life, it burst into fresh being. And alone
in the world with David, the whole venom of his vicious temperament was
ever directed against the boy's head. It was as though he saw in his
fair-haired son the unconscious cause of his ever-living sorrow. All
the more strange this, seeing that, during her life, the boy had been
to poor Flora M'Adam as her heart's core. And the lad was growing up the
very antithesis of his father. Big and hearty, with never an ache or ill
in the whole of his sturdy young body; of frank, open countenance; while
even his speech was slow and burring like any Dale-bred boy's. And
the fact of it all, and that the lad was palpably more Englishman than
Scot--ay, and gloried in it--exasperated the little man, a patriot
before everything, to blows. While, on top of it, David evinced an
amazing pertness fit to have tried a better man than Adam M'Adam.

On the death of his wife, kindly Elizabeth Moore had, more than once,
offered such help to the lonely little man as a woman only can give in
a house that knows no mistress. On the last of these occasions, after
crossing the Stony Bottom, which divides the two farms, and toiling up
the hill to the Grange, she had met M'Adam in the door.

"Yo' maun let me put yo' bit things straight for yo', mister," she had
said shyly; for she feared the little man.

"Thank ye, Mrs. Moore," he had answered with the sour smile the Dalesmen
knew so well, "but ye maun think I'm a waefu' cripple." And there he had
stood,