That was Pete--every time! Now and again the old cap peeped hastily out from behind the wash-tub and was as hastily withdrawn. Ned still stood at the gate. He hardly knew what had become of his resolve. He tried to rally it by thinking of the fate in store for him when this interval of liberty should be at an end and the day set for his trial dawn. Here was the lying witness at his mercy. He could thrash him, and thrash him well,--for fat Pete was no fighter. But somehow he felt that a boy who hid behind his mother's wash-tub ought to be allowed to stay there. Pete did not seem worth a good substantial licking. As Ned stood undecided one of his mother's injunctions flashed through his memory. "Ef ye can't git yer consent ter return good fur evil," she often said, "hold yer hands ennyhow from harmin' them ez have hurt ye." All his troubles, first and last, had come from disregarding that simple, uncultured mother's simple precepts. Ned shut the gate and walked away. His account of the day's proceedings seemed a wild, terrible story to the panic-stricken woman who sat cowering in the little room that opened on the vistas of chimney-pots and clouds and stars. He found her in tears. She had just learned of his arrest through a message from the managing editor of the paper, who sent to say that he had arranged to have Ned's wages paid to her during the boy's imprisonment as regularly as if he were still at work. The editor had some charitable hobbies which thus liberally expressed themselves, aided in this instance by his confrères of the various departments of the paper. For although the editorial force deemed Ned the tool of the incendiaries and thieves, and thought that his obstinate silence was strangely incriminating, they still had faith enough in him to believe him the victim of a deception, and innocent of all intentional wrong-doing; that he was somehow the dupe of an over-reaching craft, and the forlorn scapegoat of the real criminals. Even thus, the situation was discreditable to the last degree, and well calculated to alienate whatever friends the little lad had been able to make for himself. But when the "dude reporter," who had hied himself straightway to the office, detailed the strange disasters that had befallen the printer's devil, the editorial force remembered a thousand trifling benefactions received at his small, willing, ink-smirched hands, and a subscription, circulated among the desks, aggregated a sum sufficient to justify a promise of the continuance of the payment of his weekly wages for the indefinite time of his incarceration, till his trial should set the question of his guilt or innocence at rest.