"American, I suppose," said he to himself, "and well up to date! Now I wonder...." He stopped opposite a wayside inn standing back from the road; a record of the days of an old suburban highway, with a drinking-trough for horses and a troughlet for dogs, and a swinging sign, half obscured by snowblotch that might fall off, or not. But it would in a minute, if waited for, for its framing creaked in the wind. "I wonder where I am?" he continued. "I've seen this pothouse before. I've photographed it, if it's the same. It was the Robin Hood." A snow-slip occurred at this moment, and left the outlaw's face and a portion of the merry greenwood visible. Oh dear yes!--the Robin Hood. No mistake about that, anyhow! The pause ended in complete enlightenment. "Then I know where I am. There's the new Cazenove slum on the left. Now I've got to take care not to go down the wrong turning. One's a _cul de sac_; ends in a fence. But I fancy mine's the next--yes!--mine's the next. Addy Fossett's school's just a bit farther on. Lady Arkroyd said it wasn't a slum! A slum made up of whited sepulchres--well! suppose we say machine-pointed brick sepulchres, and let 'em go at that." The difficulty of walking through the snow, and the silence, both seemed to favour soliloquy. He plodded on, driving aside the dry white snowdrift with his feet, and cogitating. How deadly dark and silent it is down this side-street! Only one gas-lamp alight that one can see, some way on. And the silence! One might be murdered here so quietly, with so little inconvenience to one's murderer. And the cold! "Thank God it is me and not Gus," says the man in the snow through whose mind these thoughts pass. "He wouldn't be kept at home, even by a blizzard. Really--if I hadn't a good pair of eyes.... Hullo! what's that?" He quickens his pace towards something he has seen or heard. An instant after, and the silence has vanished. Piercing shrieks are on the night--a child's shrieks--shrieks of frenzied and intolerable panic, there, where nothing can be distinguished yet.... Yes!--_there_--coming this way through the snow--this side of the dim lamp-gleam the snowdrift all but hides ... but oh, so small! How can a thing so small give such a cry? How can it struggle so, either, as it is caught and picked up by a pair of strong arms, and wrapped in the bosom of a big overcoat? "Anything"--said the Rev. Athelstan, when he told the tale after--"anything to get the poor little barefooted, nightgowned scrap up off the snow, and out of the cold! The _pluck_ of the midget! I never saw such a baby. Not seven yet--just think of it!" For he often told of this adventure of his afterwards. But let us tell it now. "Oh, pleathe--pleathe--let me down!" It is such a heart-harrowing cry for liberty that its hearer almost believes himself cruel to shut his ears to it. But--the cold! "Oh, _pleathe_ let me go to c-call for the Spoleece to c-come to ... Uncle Bob...."