“Ye’ll have to take another county, Dickie, darlint,” he said, after they had discussed the matter, and found some action imperative. “I’m not afeard of ye running away an’ forgetting your poor owld grandfather. I’ve teached ye better nor that, more by token they can never expect to prosper that wrongs the helpless or the suffering.” “May I drop dead the minute such a thought enters my head!” said Dickie with energy. “Rest where you are, Jerry dear—and get well and take all the comfort ye can, for sure ye’ve been a blessed friend to me, and made a man of me when I’d have turned out nothing but a jail bird and a vagabone.” The “man,” as he termed himself, was then just twelve years of age, but his sentiments, as the reader will admit, were worthy of twice that number of years. Thus it was that Dickie came to face the world as an independent traveller. He moved over a great part of Ireland in this way, always sending the net gains regularly to old Jerry, and, on the whole, doing nearly as well as before the separation. He almost invariably met with kindness and sympathy, but once he was attacked and robbed of three days’ earnings. But in taking the money the wretches took also Dickie’s carefully cherished talisman, the broken cairngorm, and by that they were identified and convicted, while the trinket was returned to Dickie, who cherished it and guarded it, with greater faith than ever in its power. He would not have parted with that senseless bit of stone for a twenty-pound note, for it was the only link which connected the present with the past, and he never looked at it, as he was wont to declare, without remembering what he might have been but for old Jerry. “Faith, I believe if I were to lose that stone my good luck would go with it,” he repeatedly asserted, from which it will be seen that there was mixed up with Dickie’s well-doing a spice of superstition, which, however, is not a bad thing, when it keeps in the straight path feet inclined to wander. On one of the rare occasions when Dickie was able to get back as far as Belfast to see Jerry, he found the old grinder unusually weak and worn. Hitherto Jerry had doctored his leg himself, but now it had assumed such a strange appearance that he was glad to have Dickie by his side to advise him. It had begun to grow black, and, what was more strange, the pain had all gone out of it. Dickie had been doing pretty well on his travels, so he promptly decided that they should call in a doctor. When that gentleman came he looked at the leg, and then at the emaciated face of the old man, and then said compassionately— “Why did you send for me?” “To mend me leg, plase God,” said Jerry. The doctor quietly covered up the limb and shook his head. “Ye’ve more need of a praist, good man,” he said, shortly, but not unkindly. “No doctor alive will ever make you well.”