Master smiled the official smile at a Guardian’s jest; but it was no very friendly glance that followed the erect form of the Holmfirth manufacturer as he turned his good mare’s head over the hills. “Tom’s in for a bad time of it, I’m thinking,” said the master.

It was Mr. Black who conveyed the lad with a father’s love from the Workhouse to Holmfirth. And the lad went with a heart light enough, though on his cheek the tears were wet he had shed at parting from the faithful Jack. He had solemnly made over to the lamenting Workhouse drudge his boyish treasures,—the lark, that obstinately refused to sing, the lop-eared rabbit, and the hedgehog he had rescued from the clogs and sticks of a posse of village urchins—captive not of bow and spear, but of fist and toe. Moll o’ Stuarts, too, had been to bid him farewell, and, as a parting gift, had bestowed on him a child’s caul.

“Keep that all th’ days o’ your life; nivver part wi’ it, wet or fine. Yo’ll allus know th’ weather by it, as guid as a glass an’ better nor bi a mony on ’em. An’ as long as that caul’s thine, drowneded bi watter yo’ canna be. There’s mony a fine spark at sails the seas ’ud be main glad o’ that same. Hanged yo’ may be, tho’ God forbid, but drownded nivver.” And in after years, of which the reader shall read in good time, Moll o’ Stuarts was able to invoke her prophetic soul, and to attribute to her own prescience the wonderful deliverance this story shall narrate. Moll, too, brought a pair of stout stockings knit by the widow Schofield’s own plump hands, and a crown-piece, that the night before had jingled in Tom o’ Fairbank’s well-filled leathern purse.

Over the hills trudged the Schoolmaster and his ward; the dominie thoughtful, and not a little sorrowful.

“Pray God we’ve done for the best,” was his pious hope, as they reached the low wall of the Church of St. Chad’s, and one at least thought of the fair unknown, whose son was setting forth into the untried paths of life, with all the glad, unquestioning undoubting confidence of eager youth. Hard by the Church Inn they turned to the face of the steep ascent of almost unbroken moorland, threaded by a rude and rutty path, strewn with rubble and boulders, torn and wrenched from the crags above by the driving storms and angry raging winds of the rolling years. On the lower face of the hill they passed, here and there, the rude shelter of a moorland cottier, whose cow and pig and poultry gained precarious living in the lean enclosures won from the sweeping stretch of heather and coarse grass or the lowly cottage whence the familiar clack of the 

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