-only fit for dirrty
laddies and lassies."

He stood on the watch in his shop like a great spider that ate
children; and his windows were his web.

They dined off salt herrings and potatoes--much better fare than bad
porridge and watered milk. Robert Bruce the younger, who inherited his
father's name and disposition, made faces at Annie across the table as
often as he judged it prudent to run the risk of discovery; but Annie
was too stupefied with the awful change to mind it much, and indeed
required all the attention she had at command, for the arrest of
herring bones on their way to her throat.

After dinner, business was resumed in the shop, with at least the
resemblance of an increase of vigour, for Mrs Bruce went behind the
counter, and gave her husband time to sit down at the desk to write
letters and make out bills. Not that there was much of either sort of
clerkship necessary; but Bruce, like Chaucer's Man of Law, was so fond
of business, that he liked to seem busier than he was. As it happened
to be a half-holiday, Annie was sent with the rest of the children into
the garden to play up and down the walks.

"An' min'," said Bruce, "an' haud oot ower frae the dog."

In the garden Annie soon found herself at the mercy of those who had
none.

It is marvellous what an amount of latent torment there is in boys,
ready to come out the moment an object presents itself. It is not
exactly cruelty. The child that tears the fly to pieces does not
represent to himself the sufferings the insect undergoes; he merely
yields to an impulse to disintegrate. So children, even ordinarily good
children, are ready to tease any child who simply looks teasable, and
so provokes the act. Now the Bruces were not good children, as was
natural; and they despised Annie because she was a girl, and because
she had no self-assertion. If she had shown herself aggressively
disagreeable, they would have made some attempt to conciliate her; but
as it was, she became at once the object of a succession of spiteful
annoyances, varying in intensity with the fluctuating invention of the
two boys. At one time they satisfied themselves with making grimaces of
as insulting a character as they could produce; at another they rose to
the rubbing of her face with dirt, or the tripping up of her heels.
Their persecution bewildered her, and the resulting stupefaction was a
kind of support to her for a time; but at last she could endure it no
longer, being