The accident which attracted the crowd was a very common one--an overtasked horse, wearied with the long day’s labour, had stumbled and fallen; and now, the weight of the cart to which it was attached having been removed, was making convulsive plunges in the effort to rise. The carters, and the kindred class who are always to be found ready in such small emergencies, were leaping aside themselves, and pressing back the lookers on, as the poor animal struck out his great weary limbs, endeavouring to raise himself from the ground. Suddenly there was a shrill cry--“The wean--look at the wean; the brute’s fit’ll kill the wean.” John Buchanan had pushed his way into the crowd, dragging with him the reluctant Cuthbert--and there indeed, close to the great hoofs of the prostrate animal, stood one of those little pale, careworn, withered children whom one sees only in the streets of great cities, and oftenest only at this unwholesome hour of night. But the acuteness peculiar to the class seemed to have forsaken the very little wrinkled old man of the Trongate. He was standing where the next plunge would inevitably throw him down, with the strange scared look which is not fear, common to children in great peril, upon his small white puckered face. Again the panting horse threw out his hoofs in another convulsive exertion. The child was down. A shadow shot across the light. There were several cries of women. The child was thrown into somebody’s arms uninjured. The horse was on its feet, and a man, indistinctly seen in the midst of the eager crowd, struggled ineffectually to raise himself from the ground, where he had fallen. “I am hurt a little,” said the voice of Harry Muir. “Never mind, it is not much, I dare say. Some of you help me up.” There was a rush to assist him; a burst of eager inquiries. “I got a blow from the hoof; ah! I can’t tell what it is,” gasped the young man, over whose face the pallor of deadly sickness was stealing. He could not stand. They carried him--these rough strong men, so gently--with his friends crowding about him, to the nearest surgeon’s. Everybody was sympathetic; every one interested. But Harry Muir’s head had sunk upon his breast, and the fight had gone from his eyes. He was conscious of nothing but pain. The accident was a serious one; his leg was broken. CHAPTER II. “He sent me hither, stranger as I am, To tell this story.” AS YOU LIKE IT. “CUTHBERT,” said Richard Buchanan, “do, like a good fellow, go and tell his wife.” “Do you not see, man, that a stranger would alarm her more? Why make me the messenger? You say she knows you, Dick.” “Ay, she knows him,” said the second brother, “but she does not know him for any good. You see, Cuthbert, Dick’s always enticing poor Muir away--as he did to-night--and the wife wouldn’t flatter him if he went up now.”