“Pooh, pooh! Augusta,” said Mr. Ashton, tapping the lid of his snuff-box, and then, from force of habit, handing it to his wife, the wave of whose hand put it back—“pooh, pooh! child. Do you think there’s only one Blue-coat boy in the town? Besides, he was not such a little boy. I know I thought something of myself when I was his size,” said Mr. Ashton, dusting the snuff from his ruffles as he spoke. “But he would be a little boy when Ellen knew him first. She says it was before I was born.” “He could not be a Blue-coat boy then, my dear,” observed Mrs. Ashton; “he was too young.” “But Ellen showed him to me when we went to the College at Easter; and she says he has killed a snake—a real live snake, papa. And Aunt Chadwick bought Ellen such a pretty pincushion he had worked, and, oh! such a handsome bead purse!” Mr. Ashton smiled at his daughter’s enthusiasm. “Ah! I think I have heard of him before; he is a sort of _protege_ of Parson Brookes.” “He is a very honest boy,” appended Mrs. Ashton, as she examined Augusta’s hemming by the light of the nearest wax candle. “Ellen lost Prince William’s shilling that same day. You know she always wears it dangling from her neck, absurd as it is for a great girl of fifteen.” “Well?” said Augusta, looking up inquiringly. “Well, my dear, the very next afternoon the boy Jabez Clegg knocked at the door in Oldham Street with the shilling, which he said he had found in sweeping the library, and remembered seeing it on Miss Chadwick’s neck. Many a boy, at Easter, would have spent it in cakes or toffy.” “I suppose, to use one of your favourite maxims, he must have thought ‘honesty the best policy,’” remarked her husband. “Yes; and ‘duty its own reward’—for he refused the half-crown that Sarah offered him.” Mr. Ashton took another pinch of snuff, with grave consideration, then put the box, after some deliberation, into his deep waistcoat pocket, and again flapped the snuff off ruffles and neck-cloth ends. “Wouldn’t take the money, you say?” “Would not take it,” his wife repeated, folding up the finished handkerchief. After a pause, Mr. Ashton said, with his head on one side,— “I think I shall look after that younker. What is he like?” “Oh, that I cannot tell; I was not with them. But I think Sarah said he had got an ugly scar on one of his eyebrows.” Mr. Ashton brought down his hand with a clap on that of Augusta, resting on his knee. “Then, my little Lancashire witch, the poor cripple’s champion and Ellen’s hero of romance _will_ be one and the same. I must certainly look after that lad.” But even as Mr. Ashton came to that conclusion Jabez was in mortal peril, and his romance and theirs threatened to end at the beginning.