consigned, after all, to the water-hole in the furze quarry, by common consent—the grave of all the criminal, mangy, forsaken dogs in the parish of Rushbrook. As the best of dogs, like the best of men, are fallible, Flora may be said to have grown up under a sentence of death, and was only spared by a succession of reprieves from the execution of the warrant. Once or twice she made very narrow escapes, and perhaps her rescue was due to more than Harry’s powers of piteous pleading. She had been gradually, by the pertinacious efforts of her master, introduced into the house, instead of living at the stables with her mother, according to Mrs. Bloomfield’s original decree, and so had established a claim of familiarity on the regard of the stern censor herself. Two marked instances of Flora’s rubbing shoulders with that eminence above the water-hole in the quarry, which may be compared to the Tarpeian Rock, are on record. Mrs. Bloomfield, who prided herself on her success in her poultry yard, had to listen at one period to various mysterious and doleful accounts from her cook and boy-of-all-work on the inexplicable disappearance of new-laid eggs and newly-fledged chickens. As there were no disreputable characters about, and neither fox nor hawk in the vicinity, and as the innocence of Flora’s mother was as well established as the incorruptibility of the parsonage servants who brought the reports, a grave suspicion attached from the beginning to Flora as the depredator. But in the absence of positive proof, and in the face of Harry’s indignant denial, the dark suggestion only hovered in the light of a suspicion, and did not settle in the form of a conviction in people’s minds.