Accordingly, putting his small strength to the frame, he raised the sash high enough to let the cat scramble out into freedom. But, alas! his efforts did not end there. When the cat was gone his own desperate condition returned to his mind with redoubled strength. There were the loaves in dozens on the shelves within, but there was no sympathising friend present to whom to appeal. How much easier it would be to take a loan of two loaves, and come back on Monday and explain all about them to Mr Borland. If he went home without the loaves, Johnny had an idea they would all be dead before Monday, and then his father need never know anything about it till it was all explained and adjusted. I am not trying to give his reasoning as sound, but rather to show that when a child is wolfish with hunger he and reason have for the time parted company. Johnny prised the window sash a few inches higher, and wriggled himself inside. The first loaves that came to hand were grasped at. He meant to take only two, but there happened to be four sticking together, and he concluded that he might as well take the lot. He placed the big square of bread out on the window sill, and then clambered out, and was turning to reclose the window, when something glaring and far more terrible than a cat’s eye caught his gaze, and riveted him helpless and speechless to the spot. It was a bull’s eye, and the holder was a policeman, who had first been attracted by Johnny’s knocking at the front door, and then had slipped in by another entry to watch the whole proceedings from the other end of the green. The slide of the lantern had been closed till the critical moment when Johnny had accomplished his burglary, when out shone the light, and with a few quick strides the man was upon the trembling boy. “What! you’re young begun,” said the policeman, throttling Johnny nearly black in the face, and then shaking him violently lest there should be any breath left in his body by the throttling. “How old are you?” “Twelve,” gasped Johnny at random. He was barely ten, but with the wild, reproachful thought at his heart that he had disgraced and ruined himself for ever by his rashness had come a queer resolve. “And what’s yer name?” continued the man, who was from the far north, and thought he saw the gallows written in every line of the boy’s face. “Peter M^cBain.” It was the first name that came to the tongue of the boy, and he blurted it out, with death at his heart. “And far dee ye live?” continued his captor. “In the West Port.” Lies, lies! every word of it. Johnny simply named the place farthest from his own home, but then he had an object in view, and the lies wrung more agony out of him than the truth would have done. He was thinking of his father and that fierce warning in the dark—“If ever you turn thief while I’m living, never come near me or look me in the face again.”