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“And the wood deafens me, it is so full of voices.

“Christian! Christian!–Coming! Coming!

“And I thinks I has some kind of a fit, my daughter, for when I wakes, the wood is as still as death, and he is gone, as dreams goes.”

CHAPTER V.

“I really feel for the tinker-mother,” whispered Mrs. Hedgehog.

“I feel for her myself,” was my reply. “The cares of a family are heavy enough when they only last for the season, and one sleeps them off in a winter’s nap. When–as in the case of men–they last for a lifetime, and you never get more than one night’s rest at a time, they must be almost unendurable. As to prolonging one’s anxieties from one’s own families to the families of each of one’s children–no parent in his senses–“

“What is the gipsy girl saying now?” asked Mrs. Hedgehog, who had been paying more attention to the women than to my observations–an annoyance to which, as head of the family, I have been subjected oftener than is becoming.

Sybil had been kneeling at the old woman’s feet, soothing her and chafing her hands. At last she said,

“But you did get him, Mother. How was it?”

“Not for five more years, my daughter. And never in all that time could I get a sight of his face. The very first house I calls at next morning, I sees a chalk mark on the gate-post, placed there by some travelling tinker or pedler or what not, by which I knows that the neighbourhood is being made too hot for tramps and vagrants, as they call us. And go back in what disguisement I might, there was no selling a bootlace, nor begging a crust of bread there–there, where he lived.

“I makes up the ten pounds, and ties it in a bag; but I gets worse and worse in health and spirits and in confusion of mind, my daughter; and when I comes accidentally across my son in a Bedfordshire lane, and his wife is drinking, and he is in much bewilderment with the children, I takes up again with them, and I was with them when Christian comes to me the second time.”

“He came back to you?”

“Learning and the confinement of stone walls, my daughter, than which no two things could be more contrary to the nature of those who dwells in the woods and lanes. I will not deny that the clergyman–and especially the young clergywoman–had been very good to him; but for which he would probably have run away long before. But what is bred in the bone comes out in the flesh. He does pretty well with the learning, and he bears with the confinement of school, though it is worse than that of the clergy-house. But when a rumour has crept out that he is not the son of the clergyman nor of the clergywoman, and he is taunted with being a gipsy and a vagrant, he lays his bare hands on those nearest to him, my daughter, and comes away on his bare feet.”

“How did he find you, Mother?”

“He has no fixed intentions beyond running away, my daughter; but as he is sitting in a hedge to bandage one of his feet with his handkerchief, he sees our patteran, and he goes on, keeping it by the left, and sees it again, and so follows it, and comes home.”

“You mean that he came to you?”

“I do, my dear. For home is not a house that never moves from one place, built of stone or brick, and with a front door for the genteel and a back door for the common people. If it was so, prisons would be homes. But home, my daughter, is where persons is whom you belongs to, and it may be under a hedge to-day and in a fair to-morrow.”

“Mother,” said Sybil, “what did you do about the ten pounds?”

“I will tell you, my daughter. I was obliged to wait longer than was agreeable to me before proceeding to that neighbourhood, for the police was searching everywhere, and it would be wearisome to relate to you with what difficulty Christian was concealed. My plans had been long made, as you know.