BLACK SHEEP!

BY THE AUTHOR OF "LAND AT LAST," "KISSING THE ROD,"
&c. &c.

CHAPTER I. IN THE AVENUE.

"I'm to keep to the right?"

" Keep on a bearin' to the right, sir, 'cross
Watch Common, and down One Ash Hill, and
that'll bring you straight on to Poynings, sir!
No luggage, sir?"

"None, thank you!"

"Luggage! no! I should think not! party's
without a overcoat, don't you see, Thomas?—
without a overcoat, and it freezin' like mad!
Poynings, indeed! What's he doin' there?
He don't look much like one of the company!
More like after the spoons, I should say!"

The polite porter who had made the inquiry,
and the satirical station-master who had
commented on the reply, remained gazing for a minute
or two at the stranger who had just arrived at the
Amherst station of the South-Eastern Railway,
and then went back to the occupations from which
the premonitory whistle had called them; which,
in the porter's case, consisted of a retirement to
a little wooden watch-box where, surrounded by
oil-cans, grease-boxes, dirty swabs of cloth, and
luggage-barrows reared on end and threatening
with their fore-feet, he proceeded to the mending
of his shoes with a bit of tin and a few tacks,
while the station-master turned to the accounts
which extracted the marrow from his very soul,
and carried on what he called the "tottle" of a
drove of two hundred and sixty oxen, conveyed
at per head.

"Freezing like mad." The station-master was
right. The frost, which of late years holds aloof,
utterly destroying the pictorial prophecies of the
artists of the illustrated periodicals regarding
Christmas Day, and which, with the exception
of a two days' light rime, had left January a
moist and muggy month, had set in with the
commencement of February, hard, black, and
evidently lasting. The iron-bound roads rang
again, even under the thin boots of the stranger,
who hurried over them with a light and fleeting
step. The sharp keen air whirling over bleak
Watch Common so penetrated his thin and
wretched clothing, that he shivered horribly, and,
stopping for an instant, beat his sides with his
hands in an awkward manner, as one to whom
the process was new, and who was vainly
endeavouring to imitate some action he had
seen. Then, he hurried on with a short rapid
jerking step, essentially different from the
league-swallowing swinging pace of the regular
pedestrian accustomed to exercise:
stumbling over the frozen solid ruts made by the
heavy cart-wheels, slipping on the icy puddles,
and ever and anon pausing to take fresh
breath, or to place his hand against his loudly-
beating heart. As he skirted the further edge
of the common, and arrived at the brow of
the hill which the porter had mentioned to him,
and which he recognised by the solitary tree
whose branches clanged above him in the night
wind, he heard, by the chimes of a distant church,
ten o'clock rung out sharp and clear through
the frosty air. He stopped, counted each chime,
and then set off again at a quickened pace, his
progress down the descent being easier now,
muttering to himself as he went:

"Ten o'clock! I must press on, or they'll
all be in bed, I suppose. Beastly respectable,
old Carruthers, from what I can make out from
the Madre, and what little I saw of him!
Servants up to prayers and all that kind of thing.
No chance of getting hold of her, if I can't make
her know I am there, before those prayers come
off. Glass of cold water and flat candlestick
directly they're over, I suppose, and a kiss to
Missy and God bless you all round, and off to
bed! By George, what a life! What an
infernal, moping, ghostly, dreary existence! And
yet they've got money, these scoundrels, and old
Carruthers could give you a cheque that would
make you wink. Could! Yes, but wouldn't,
specially to me! Ba, ba, black sheep, and all
the rest of it! Here's a poor tainted mutton
for you, without the wind being in the least
tempered to him! Jove, it goes through me
like a knife! There'll be a public somewhere
near, I suppose, and when I've drawn the
Madre, I'll step off there and have some hot
rum-and-water before turning in. Hold up,
there, you hawbuck brute, pull your other rein!
What's the use of your lamps, if they don't
show you people in the road?"

He had sprung aside as he spoke, and now stood
flat against and pushing into the leafless hedge
as a carriage with flashing lamps and steaming
horses whirled so closely by him as almost to
brush his arm. The coachman paid no attention
to his outcry, nor did the footman, who,
almost hidden in overcoats, was fast asleep in