These, you must know, were the days of the worthy Druids, who guided the religious feelings of the country, and, as has been occasionally the fashion of ecclesiastics in all ages, used the ignorance and superstition of the people to establish their own authority.’Take them all in all, I don’t know that they were worse than other priests whom I have seen upon my banks in later ages; but they had an awkward habit of occasionally discovering that their personal enemies were required by the gods as a sacrifice, and thus not unfrequently managed to propitiate their own vengeance and that of the irate deities at one and the same moment. Smith’s father, having been unlucky enough to fall under the ban of one of these respectable gentlemen, was sacrificed one fine morning, in spite of all his protestations; and, his mother having died previously, the child was left an orphan, poor and desolate. Under these circumstances you will wonder what became of him. There were no poor-laws, and consequently no workhouses, in those days. “Relieving officers” were unknown, and even parish beadles had not come into being. Indeed, if this had been the case, I should have no legend to relate to you upon my present theme. Smith would have lived a different life altogether. He would very likely have been the interesting subject of discussion between several parishes, each laudably anxious to escape being called upon to pay for his nurture and education, who would possibly have spent in {015}the contest more than would have fed and educated twenty Smiths. [Illustration: 028] Eventually he would have been consigned to the workhouse school until he had arrived at an age when he might possibly have been able to learn something, {016}at which moment this would very properly have been prevented by his being transferred to the enlivening employment of rook-keeping, from which he would have gradually risen to the position of a day-labourer upon some neighbouring farm, unless he had evinced sufficient intellectual ability to have aspired to the rank and dignity of “waggoner’s mate.” This brilliant career, however, was not open to our hero in the benighted days of which I speak. This being so, he not unnaturally did something else. He disappeared from the eyes of the world in a manner which would have been perfectly marvellous if there had been anybody who cared to marvel at it. This, however, was not the case.