“Look here,” said one of the others--“here’s old Harry coming, if you like to speak to him about your lad. Speak up and don’t be frightened. He ain’t at all a bad sort, and if you tell him as the boy’s spry and handy, and don’t mind a hard day’s work--Speak up! only don’t say I told you.” And the benevolent adviser disappeared hastily, and began to pull about some old gigs which were ranged on the rafts, as if much too busily occupied to spare a word. The woman went up to the master with a heart beating so strongly that she could scarcely hear her own voice. On any other occasion she would have been shy and reluctant. Asking favours was not in her way--she did not know how to do it. She could not feign or compliment, or do anything to ingratiate herself with a patron. But her internal agitation was so strong that she was quite uplifted beyond all sense of the effort which would have been so trying to her on any other occasion. She went up to him sustained by her excitement, which at the same time blunted her feelings, and made her almost unaware of the very words she uttered. “Master,” she said, going straight to the point, as the excited mind naturally does--“I have a boy that is very anxious for work. He is a good lad, and very kind to me. We’ve been tramping about the country--nothing better, for all my folks was in that way; but he don’t take after me and my folks. He thinks steady work is better, and to stay still in one place.” “He is in the right of it there,” was the reply. “Maybe he is in the right,” she said; “I’m not the one to say, for I’m fond of my freedom and moving about. But, master, you’ll have one in your place that is not afraid of hard work if you’ll have my son.” “Who is your son? do I know him?” said the master, who was a man with a mobile and clean-shaven countenance, like an actor, with a twinkling eye and a suave manner, the father of an athletic band of river worthies who were regarded generally with much admiration by “the college gentlemen,” to whom their prowess was well known,--“who is your son?” The woman grew sick and giddy with the tumult of feeling in her. The words were simple enough in straightforward meaning; but they bore another sense, which made her heart flutter, and took the very light from her eyes. “Who was her son?” It was all she could do to keep from betraying herself, from claiming some one else as her son, very different from Dick. If she had done so, she would have been simply treated as a mad woman: as it was, the bystanders, used to tramps of a very different class, looked at her with instant suspicion, half disposed to attribute her giddiness and faltering to a common enough cause. She mastered herself without fully knowing either the risk she had run or the looks directed to her. “You don’t know him,” she said. “We came here but last night. One of the college gentlemen was to speak for him. He’s a good hard-working lad, if you’ll take my word for it, that knows him best.”