an ungrateful dog, and like other ungrateful dogs you shall be punished."

"I wanted to live like other men," I said sullenly.

"Haven't I fed you, lodged you, looked after you?" he snapped out. "Where would you have been, but for me?"

"I might have been a better man," I answered him. "I've slaved for you for ten long years, and you've done your best to starve me, body and soul. I've taken your money, but it isn't as much as you'd have had to pay me in those ten years, if I'd been some poor devil of a clerk independent of you!"

"We won't bandy words," said my uncle, getting up from my bed. "Go to bed; I'll decide what to do with you in the morning."

Now, wisely speaking, of course, I ought to have made good my escape that night. But there was a certain bravado in me—a certain feeling, however wrong, that I was justified to an extent in what I had done—for the labourer is worthy of his hire. So I went to bed, and awaited the morning with what confidence I could. Being young, I slept soundly.

I was the only living relative of Zabdiel Blowfield, and one would have thought—one, at least, who did not know him—that he would have shown some mercy. But mercy was not in his nature, and I had wounded the man in that tenderest part of him—the pocket. Incredible as it may seem, I was handed over to justice on a charge of forgery and falsification of books, and in due course I stood my trial, with my uncle as the chief witness against me.

Uncle Zabdiel made a very excellent witness, too, from the point of view of the prosecution. I—Norton Hyde—stood in the dock, I flatter myself, rather a fine figure of a young man, tall, and straight, and dark-haired; the prosecutor—and a reluctant one at that—stood bowed, and old, and trembling, and told the story of my ingratitude. He had brought me up, and he had educated me; he had fed, and clothed, and lodged me; but for him I must have died ignominiously long before. And I had robbed him, and had spent his money in riotous living. He wept while he told the tale, for the loss of the money was a greater thing than most men would suppose.

The limb of the law he had retained for the prosecution had a separate cut at me on his account. According to that gentleman I was a monster; I would have robbed a church; there was scarcely any crime in the calendar of which I would not have been capable. It was plainly suggested that the best thing that could happen to society would be to 

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