“Oh, that beast of a mongrel?” The gardener made a stride as if to seize the dog. Clare bounded from him. The man burst into a mocking laugh. “He’s a good dog, indeed, sir!” said Clare. “You’ll give him the sack before I give you a job.” “We’re old friends, sir; we can’t be parted!” “I thought as much!” cried the gardener. “They’re always ready to work, an’ so hungry! But will they part with the mangy dog? Not they! Hard work and good wages ain’t nowhere beside a mongrel pup! Get out! Don’t I know the whole ugly bilin’ of ye!” Clare turned away with a gentle good-morning, which the man did not get out of his heart for a matter of two days, and departed, hugging Abdiel. He was often cold and always hungry, but his life was anything but dull. The man who does not know where his next meal is to come from, is seldom afflicted with ennui. That is the monopoly of the enviable with nothing to do, and everything money can get them. A foolish west-end life has immeasurably more discomfort in it than that of a street Arab. The ordinary beggar, while in tolerable health, finds far more enjoyment than most fashionable ladies. Thus Clare went wandering long, seeking work, and finding next to none--all the time upheld by the feeling that something was waiting for him somewhere, that he was every day drawing nearer to it. Not once yet had he lost heart. In very virtue of unselfishness and lack of resentment, he was strong. Not once had he shed a tear for himself, not once had he pitied his own condition. Chapter LII. MISS TEMPEST. Without knowing it, he was approaching the sea. Walking along a chain of downs, he saw suddenly from the top of one of them, for the first time in his memory though not in his life, the sea--a pale blue cloud, as it appeared, far on the horizon, between two low hills. The sight of it, although he did not at first know what it was, brought with it a strange inexplicable feeling of dolorous pleasure. For this he could not account. It was the faintest revival of an all but obliterated impression of something familiar to his childhood, lying somewhere deeper than the memory, which was a blank in regard to it. But that feeling was not all that the sight awoke in him. The pale blue cloud bore to him such a look of the eternal, that it seemed the very place for God to live in--the solemn, stirless region of calm in which the being to whom now of late he had first begun in reality to pray, kept his abode. The hungry, worn, tattered boy, with nothing to call his own but a great hope and a little dog, fell down on his bare knees on the hard road, and stretched out his hands in an ecstasy toward the low cloud. The far-off ringing tramp of a horse’s feet aroused him. He rose light as an athlete, the great hope grown twice its former size, and hunger forgotten.