"Then, of course, he is Achilles." At this point the boundaries of strangership seem insistent. After all, this man may be Tom or Dick or Harry. "You will excuse my speaking to you," says the young lady. "I had no one to send, and I saw you from the terrace. It was for the dog's sake." In his chivalrous determination not to overdraw the blank cheque she has signed for him unawares, the stranger conceives that a few words of dry apology will meet the case, and leave him to go on his way. So, though powerfully ignoring the fact that that outcome will be an unwelcome one, he replies:--"I quite understand, and I am sincerely grateful for your caution." He gets at a dog-chain in the pocket of his waterproof overcoat, and at the click of it Achilles comes to be tied up. As he fastens the clasp to its collar, he adds:--"I should not have let him run loose like this, only that I am so sure of him. He is town-bred and a stranger to the chase. He can collect sheep, owing to his ancestry; but he never does it now, because he has been forbidden." While he speaks these last words he is examining something in the dog's leather collar. "It will hold, I think," says he. "A cut in the strap--it looks like." Then this oddly befallen colloquy ends and each gives the other a dry good-evening. The young lady's last sight of that acquaintance of five minutes shows him endeavouring to persuade the dog not to drag on his chain. For Achilles, for some dog-reason man will never know, is no sooner leashed than he makes restraint necessary by pulling against it with all his might. "I hope that collar won't break," says the young lady as she goes back to dress for dinner. The sun's gleam is dead, and the black cloud-bank that hides it now is the rain that is coming soon. See!--it has begun already. * * * * * Old Mrs. Solmes at the Ranger's Lodge, a mile distant, said to her old husband:--"Thou'rt a bad ma-an, Stephen, to leave thy goon about lwoaded, and the vary yoong boy handy to any mischief. Can'st thou not bide till there coom time for the lwoadin' of it?" Said old Stephen sharply, "Gwun, wench? There be no _gwun_. 'Tis a roifle! And as fower the little Seth, yander staaple where it hangs is well up beyond the reach of un. Let a' be, Granny!" The old woman, in whom grandmotherhood had overweighted all other qualities, by reason of little Seth's numerous first cousins, made no reply, but looked uneasily at the rifle on the wall. Little Seth--her appropriated grandchild, both his parents being dead--was too small at present to do any great harm to anyone but himself; but the time might come. He was credited with having swallowed an inch-brad, without visible inconvenience; and there was a threatening appearance in his eye as of one who would very soon climb up everywhere, fall off everything, appropriate the forbidden, break the frangible, and, in short, behave as--according to his grandmother--his father had done before him.