After his parents had gone, he settled down happily enough in the big compound, which he soon learned to call "the garding." The name of the bungalow he gathered from most of the people with whom he came in contact was "The 'All," though there were some who called it "Manors," and Uncle Jimmy, who, too, apparently possessed more than one name, was invariably referred to by Hughie's friends in the village as "Ole Peppery." Very shortly after his parents' departure Hughie overheard a conversation between his uncle and Mrs. Capper, the lady who managed the household, which puzzled him a good deal. "Understand, Capper, I won't have it," said his uncle. "Think what people will say, sir," urged Mrs. Capper respectfully but insistently. "I don't care a"--Capper coughed discreetly here--"what people say. The boy is not going to be decked out in crape and hearse-plumes to please you or any other old woman." "Hearse-plumes would not be essential, sir," said the literal Capper. "But I think the child should have a little black suit." "The child will run about in his usual rags," replied Old Peppery, in a voice of thunder; "and if I catch you or any one else stuffing him up with yarns about canker-worms or hell-fire, or any trimmings of that description, I tell you straight that there will be the father and mother of a row." "Yes, sir," said Capper meekly. "And I desire, sir," she added in the same even tone, "to give warning." Thereupon Uncle Jimmy had stamped his way downstairs to the hall, and Hughie was left wondering what the warning could have been which Mrs. Capper desired to utter. It must have been a weighty one, for she continued to deliver it at intervals during the next ten years, long indeed after Hughie's growing intelligence had discovered its meaning. But her utterances received about as much attention from her employer as Cassandra's from hers. However, the immediate result of the conversation recorded above was that Mrs. Capper made no attempt to deck Hughie in crape or hearse-plumes; and later on, when he was old enough to understand the meaning of death, his uncle told him how his parents had gone to their God together--"the happiest fate, old man, that can fall on husband and wife"--one stormy night in the Bay of Biscay, in company with every other soul on board the troop-ship Helianthus, and that henceforth Hughie must be prepared to regard the broken-down old buffer before him as his father and mother. Hughie had gravely accepted this arrangement, and for more than seventeen years he and his uncle had treated one another as father and son.