a third, and then with the third a fourth-four round, bullet-heads, four fierce, hostile pairs of eyes staring at Hamlet and Jeremy.

Jeremy stared back, feeling that here was some trick played upon him, as when the conjurer at Thompson's had produced a pigeon out of a handkerchief. The trick effect was heightened by the fact that the four heads and the sturdy bodies connected with them were graduated in height to a nicety, as you might see four clowns at a circus, as were the four bears, a symmetry almost divine and quite unnatural.

The eldest, the fiercest, and most hostile had a face and shoulders that might belong to a boy of sixteen; the youngest and smallest might have been Jeremy's age. Jeremy did not notice any of this. Very plain to him was the fact that the four faces to whomsoever they might belong did not care either for him or his dog. One to four, he was in a situation of some danger; he was suddenly aware that he had never seen boys quite so ferocious in appearance. The street boys of Polchester were milk and water to them. Hamlet also felt this. He was sitting up, his head raised, his body stiff, intent, and you could feel within him the bark strangled by the melodrama of the situation.

Jeremy said rather feebly:
"Hullo!"

The reply was a terrific ear-shattering bellow from four lusty throats, then more distinctly:

"Get out of this!"

Fear was in his heart; he was compelled, afterward, to admit it. He could only reply very feebly:

"Why?"

Glaring, the eldest replied:

"If you don't, we 'll make you." Then, "This is ours here.”

Hamlet was now quivering all over, and Jeremy was afraid lest he should make a dash for the boulders; he therefore got to his feet, holding Hamlet's collar with his hand, and, smiling, answered:

"I'm sorry.

I did n't know. I've

only just come." "Well, get out, then," was the only reply.

What fascinated him like a dream was the way that the faces did not move or more body reveal itself. Painted against the blue sky they might have been, ferocious stares and all. There was nothing more to be done; he beat an inglorious retreat, not indeed running, but walking with what dignity he could summon, Hamlet at his side uttering noises like a kettle on the boil.

must go near that farm-on no account whatever, on no account whatever, go near it."

"Why not, Father?" asked Jeremy. "Is there scarlet fever there?"

"Because I say so is quite enough," said Mr. Cole. "There's a family staying there you must have nothing to do with. Perhaps you will see them in the distance; you must avoid them and never speak to them."

"Are they very wicked?" asked Mary, her voice vibrating low with the drama of the situation.

"Never mind what they are. They are not fit companions for you children. It is most unfortunate that they are here so close to us. Had I known it, I would not, I think, have come here." Jeremy said nothing; these were, of course, his friends of the morning. He could see now, straight across the breakfast-table, those eight burning, staring eyes.

Later, from the slope of the green hill above the rectory, he looked across the gleaming beach at the church, the road, and then, in the distance, the forbidden farm. Strange how the forbidding of anything made one from the very bottom of one's soul long for it! Yesterday, staring across the green slopes and hollows, the farm would have been but a gray patch sewn into the purple hill that hung behind it. Now it was mysterious, crammed with hidden life of its own, the most dramatic point in the whole landscape. What had they done, that family that was so terrible? What was there about those four boys that he had never seen in any boys before? He longed to know them with a burning, desperate longing. Nevertheless, a whole week passed without any contact. Once Jeremy saw, against the sky-line, on the

hill behind the church, a trail of four, single file, silhouetted black. They passed steadily, secretly, bent on their own mysterious purposes. The sky, when their figures had left it, was painted with drama.

Once Mary reported that, wandering along the beach, a wild figure, almost naked, had started from behind a rock and shouted at her. She ran, of course, and behind her there echoed a dreadful laugh. But the best story of all was from Helen, who, passing the graveyard, had seen go down the road a most beautiful lady, most beautifully dressed. According to Helen, she was the most lovely lady ever seen, with jewels hanging from her ears, pearls round her neck, and her clothes a bright orange. She had walked up the road and gone through the gate into the farm.

The mystery would have excited them all even more than in fact it did, had Caerlyon itself been less entrancing. But what Caerlyon turned out to be no words can describe. Those were the days, of course, before golflinks in Glebeshire, and although no one who has ever played on the Caerlyon Links will ever wish them away, they the handsomest, kindest, most fantastic sea-links in all England, yet I will not pretend that those rounds on the green slopes, sliding so softly down to the sea-shore, bending back so gently to the wild mysteries of the Poonderry Moor, had not then a virgin charm that now they have lost. Who can decide?

But for children thirty years ago what a kingdom! Glittering with color, they had the softness of a loving mother, the sudden tumbled romance of an adventurous elder brother. They caught all the colors of the floating sky

in their laps, and the shadows flew like birds from shoulder to shoulder, and then suddenly the hills would shake their sides, and all those shadows would slide down to the yellow beach and lie there like purple carpets. You could race and race and never grow tired, lie on your back and stare into the fathomless sky, roll over forever and come to no harm, wander and never be lost. The first gate of the kingdom and the last-the little golden square underneath the tower where the green witch has her stall of treasures that she never sells.

§ 3

Then the great adventure occurred. One afternoon the sun shone so gloriously that Jeremy was blinded by it, blinded and dream-smitten, so that he sat, perched on the garden wall of the rectory, staring before him at the glitter and the sparkle, seeing nothing but perhaps a little boat of dark wood with a ruby sail floating out to the horizon, having on its boards sacks of gold and pearls and diamonds, gold in fat slabs, pearls in white, shaking heaps, diamonds that put out the eyes, so bright they were, going, going-whither? He did not know, but shaded his eyes against the sun, and the boat was gone, and there was nothing there but an unbroken blue of sea, with the black rocks fringing it.

Mary called up to him from the garden and suggested that they should go out and pick flowers, and still in a dream he clambered down from the wall, and stood there nodding his head like a mandarin. He suffered himself to be led by Mary into the highroad, only stopping for a moment to whistle for Hamlet, who came running across the

lawn as though he had just been shot out of a cannon.

It can have been only because he was sunk so deep in his dream that he wandered, without knowing it, down over the beach, jumping the hill stream that intersected it, up the sand past the church, out along the road that led straight to the forbidden farm. Nor was Mary thinking of their direction; she was having one of her happy days, her straw hat on the back of her head, her glasses full of sunlight, her stockings wrinkled about her legs, walking, her head in the air, singing one of the strange tuneless chants that came to her when she was happy. There was a field on their right, with a break in the hedge; through the break she saw buttercups, thousands of them, and loosestrife and snapdragons. climbed the gate and vanished into the field. Jeremy walked on, scarcely realizing her absence. Suddenly he heard a scream; he stopped, and Hamlet stopped, pricking up his ears. Another scream, then a succession, piercing and terrible; then over the field-gate Mary appeared, tumbling over regardless of all beholders and proprieties, then running, crying, "Jeremy! Jeremy! Jeremy!" buttercups scattering from her hand as she ran. Her face was one question-mark of terror, her hat was gone, her hairribbon dangling, her stockings about her ankles. All she could do was to cling to Jeremy crying: "Oh! oh! oh! Ah! ah! ah!"

She

"What is it?" he asked roughly, his fear for her making him impatient. "Was it a bull?"

"No, no. Oh, Jeremy! Oh dear! oh dear! The boys! They hit mepulled my hair!"

"What boys?" But already he knew.

Recovering a little, she told him. She had not been in the field a moment, and was bending down, picking her first buttercups, when she felt herself violently seized from behind, her arms held, and, looking up, there were three boys standing there, all around her, terrible, fierce boys, looking ever so wicked. They tore her hat off her head, pulled her hair, and told her to leave the field at once, never to come into it again; that it was their field and she 'd better not forget it, and to tell all her beastly family that they'd better not forget it either, and that they'd be shot if they came in there.

"Then they took me to the gate and pushed me over. They were very rough. I've got bruises." She began to cry as the full horror of the event broke upon her.

Jeremy's anger was terrible to witness. He took her by the arm.

"Come with me," he said.

He led her to the end of the road beyond the church.

"Now you go home," he said. "Don't breathe a word to any one till I get back."

had been forbidden to enter the place, and there were four of them. And such a four! Then he shrugged his shoulders, a very characteristic action of his, and marched ahead.

The gate of the farm swung easily open, and then at once he was upon them, all four of them sitting in a row upon a stone wall at the far corner of the yard and staring at him. It was a dirty, messy place, and a fitting background for that company. The farm itself looked fierce, with its blind gray wall and its sullen windows, and the yard was in fearful confusion, oozing between the stones with shiny yellow streams and dank coagulating pools, piled high with heaps of stinking manure, pigs wandering in middle distance, hens and chickens, and a ruffian dog chained to his kennel.

The four looked at Jeremy without moving.

Jeremy came close to them and said: "You 're a lot of dirty cads." They made neither answer nor movement. "Dirty cads to touch my sister, a girl who could n't touch you."

Still no answer, only one, the small

"I'll get your hat," he answered. "And take Hamlet with you.'

He watched her set off. No harm could come to her there, in the open. She had only to cross the beach and climb the hill. He watched her until she had jumped the stream, Hamlet running in front of her; then he turned back. He climbed the gate into the field. There was no one; only the golden sea of buttercups, and near the gate a straw hat. He picked it up and, back in the road again, stood hesitating. There was only one thing to do, and he knew it; but he hesitated. He

gate behind Jeremy.

"I'm not afraid of you," said Jeremy (he was, terribly afraid). “I would n't be afraid of a lot of dirty sneaks like you are to hit a girl!" Still no answer; so he ended:

"And we'll go wherever we like. It is n't your field, and we 've just as much right to it as you have."

He turned to go, and faced the boy at the gate. The other three had now climbed off the wall, and he was surrounded. He had never, since the night with the sea-captain, been in so perilous a situation. He thought that they would murder him, and then

hide his body under the manure. They looked quite capable of it, and in some strange way this farm was so completely shut off from the outside world, the house watched so silently, the wall was so high! And he was very small indeed compared with the biggest of the four. No, he did not feel happy.

Nothing could be more terrifying than their silence, but if they were silent, he could be silent, too; so he just stood there and said nothing.

"What are you going to do about it?" suddenly asked the biggest of the four.

"Do about what?" he replied, his voice trembling despite himself, simply, as it seemed to him, from the noisy beating of his heart.

"Our cheeking your sister."

"I can't do much," Jeremy said, "when there are four of you; but I'll fight the one my own size."

That hero, grinning, moved forward to Jeremy, but the one who had already spoken broke out:

"Let him out. We don't want him. And don't you come back again!" he suddenly shouted.

"I will," Jeremy shouted in return, "if I want to," and then, I regret to say, took to his heels and ran madly down the road.

84

Now, this was an open declaration of war and not lightly to be disregarded. Jeremy said not a word of it to any one, not even to the wide-eyed Mary, who had been waiting in a panic of terror under the oak-tree, like the lady in Carpaccio's picture of St. George and the dragon, longing for her true knight to return, all "bloody and tumbled," to quote Miss Jane Porter's "Thad

deus of Warsaw." He was not bloody, nor was he tumbled, but he was seriousminded and preoccupied. This was all very nice, but it was pretty well going to spoil the holidays, these fellows hanging round and turning up just whenever they pleased, frightening everybody and perhaps this sudden thought made, for a moment, his heart stand still-doing something really horrible to Hamlet.

He felt as though he had the whole burden of it on his shoulders, as though he were on guard for all the family. There was no one to whom he could speak, no one at all.

For several days he moved about as though in enemy country, looking closely at hedges, scanning hill horizons, keeping Hamlet as close to his side as possible. No sign of the ruffians, no word of them at home; they had faded into smoke and gone down with the wind.

Suddenly, one morning, when he was in a hollow of the downs, throwing pebbles at a tree, he heard a voice: "Hands up or I fire!"

He turned round, and saw the eldest of the quartet close to him. Although he had spoken so fiercely, he was not looking fierce, but rather was smiling in a curious crooked kind of way. Jeremy could see him more clearly than before, and a strange enough object he

was.

He was wearing a dirty old pair of flannel cricketing trousers and a grubby shirt open at the neck. One of his eyes was bruised, and he had a cut across his nose; but the thing in the main that struck Jeremy now was his appearance of immense physical strength. His muscles seemed simply to bulge under his shirt; he had the neck of a prize-fighter. He was a great