“Excuse me, sir; I forgot about the little uns,” said the tramp, falling back into his former subdued tones, and evidently perfectly understanding the toll-keeper’s haste to get the children out of hearing. “I’ve seen the day when I’d ’a’ been horrified at such words myself. It’s the way the world goes. We’ve good occasion to look mercifully on them as is far down, ’cause we may get into their state afore we die. I knew a man once—a Methody he was—who preached a sermon on that man that was hanged for killing his sweetheart up in London. It would have done you good to hear it—how he pitched into that poor chap in the condemned cell. Well, that same Methody quarrelled with a man about some furniture, and went home and got a log of wood, and came back and struck the other over the head till he died, and he was had up for murder, and convicted and hanged for it, as sure as you stand there. I wondered, when I saw him brought out, if he had been pitching into himself when he was in the condemned cell;” and the white-haired tramp laughed a hard, sardonic, unmusical laugh, without a vestige of merriment in the sound. The toll-keeper fidgeted uneasily, and began to wish this man of such changing moods gone. “Are you going far?” he asked, wishing to change the subject. “I’m going on—on—to be hanged,” said the stranger, absently; then, recovering himself on noting the toll-keeper’s look of horror, he said, abruptly, “What do you call this ’ere town?” The toll-keeper named the place. “That’s it!” cried the tramp, rousing up and speaking with a kind of triumphant ferocity. “That’s the place—I’m not going far past that. I’ve come to find a man out and pay a debt.” To pay a debt!—a man who had just parted with his last penny! The toll-keeper’s suspicions were confirmed—the old man’s brain was affected; his wrongs, if he had any, had deprived him of reason. At this stage there came an interruption to their conversation from a field on the opposite side of the road. There was no gate or stile at that part of the field, but over the wall there came clambering a gamekeeper and a gentleman, who had evidently been hard at work with the gun among the woods and coverts further back. The gamekeeper, after a word or two from his companion, walked on with the heavy bag of game, while the gentleman strolled forward familiarly to the toll-keeper’s door, wiping the sweat from his brow, and looking almost as tired as the tramp there seated. As he did so, the tramp noted what a fine face the gentleman owned—not so very pretty or finely proportioned, but full of sympathy and gentle courtesy, and altogether likeable and attractive even to a man old, soured, and broken in spirit. “A warm day, John,” the new-comer said, with just one swift passing glance at the tramp on the bench. “A glass of lemonade, as quick as you can, for I’m dying of thirst.” “Will you no come in an’ sit doon, sir?” returned the toll-keeper, obsequiously.