“Make ’ee my climbing boy,” he answered promptly, and with a hideous grin. “You’re my luck. D’ee see? Say you’re a gurl, and I’ll”-- He hissed in his breath, and looked at me like a beast of prey. “There,” he ended; “get under, and so much’s sniff at your peril!” Some distant sound, perhaps, startled him. He stuffed me into my former position, and, covering me again with the bags, turned and clicked up his pony. I lay in a half faint, scarce daring to breathe, so utterly had this monster succeeded in subduing me. I cried, incessantly but quietly, hearing hour by hour the wheels grind under my ear, till the sound and physical exhaustion induced in me a sort of delirium. All this time, the hope of pursuit and rescue never occurred to me, I believe. Did they occur to Proserpine having once felt the inhumanity of her sooty abductor? But now all of a sudden the anguish grew unendurable. I must move or die. And at the moment I became conscious of the vinaigrette still clutched convulsively in my little fist. Sure never death offered a sweeter release. Very softly I raised it, and found oblivion. I might have sought to use it on my enemy, and escape; but, alas! the unsophisticated mind of the child could compass no such artifice. We went on all day, as I realised during the intervals of my waking, by the unfrequented roads, jolting, loitering, sometimes in lonely places halting to rest the pony. The moral force my master (as I must now call him) put upon himself to avoid the wayside taverns, is the most convincing proof of his tenacity. At last, a thicker darkness descended upon me, lying there in hopeless apathy, and night and sleep stretched their shroud over my miseries. I awoke to rough movement and the sound of voices. My master was carrying me into a little ill-lighted cottage, which stood solitary upon the edge of a common. Sharp and brilliant, at no great distance, in a soughing night, sparkled the first lamps of a town. I was borne into a tiny room, where something, covered with a cloth, lay stretched upon a rickety table. My master put me to the ground, and stood back to regard me. Another man, an expressionless sweep like himself, but gaunt and bent-shouldered, joined silent issue in this scrutiny. “Well,” said the latter at length, “they’ll fit right enow; but damn the exchange!” He stopped to cough rendingly; then went on-- “If you mean a deal, I’m game for half a bull, and there’s my word on it. But burn them duds, Johnny! I won’t take the risk on ’em.” My master considered. “Mayhap you’re right,” said he. “Call it done.” The words were hardly out of his mouth before the other had jerked the cloth from the table. And there underneath lay the dead stiff body of a little sooty boy. His hands were griped at his chest, as if in agony of its œdematous swelling, and his bared eyeballs and teeth were as white as porcelain.