Mrs. Sergison kissed him. "You are quite right to be troubled about it," she said. "Stories are very wrong. But this only sounded like one. You are

sure you see?"

"I'm trying to," said Rudd.

"Very well," said his mother. "Now go and ask Jane who it was. I hope it was no one I should have liked to have seen."

Rudd went, in a stupor.

When he was going to bed he related the incident to Sarah.

"It wasn't telling the truth, was it?" he said. Sarah, who disliked Society and its pretences, agreed that it was not.

"Because mother was in," he continued. at home. She was at home all the time."

"She was

"You must forget it," said Sarah. "It's a regular thing they say. Your mother didn't invent it, and I'm sure she doesn't like using it."

"What I think is," said Rudd, "that Jane ought to have said, 'Mrs. Sergison is at home, but she doesn't want to see you.' That would have been the truth."

R

CHAPTER IV

ENTERTAINERS, AND A SHOCK

UDD'S mother, loving and solicitous as she was, was, after all, like many mothers, only his walking-stick. His crutch was Sarah. Mrs. Sergison's first duties were to her husband; Sarah's only duties were to Rudd.

Sarah Juniper had had charge of him from his earliest moments. She dressed him and undressed him, and between those two great events she was his constant companion.

She was a plain but pleasant looking woman of between thirty-five and forty, in a mauve print dress. Her hands were rough and powerful, as Rudd knew when she had occasion to hold him firmly, which happened now and then when he had been naughty and must be forcibly got back in the house, or when the cod-liver-oil season set in.

Certain crusted scraps of nursery wisdom were in Sarah's repertory, such as "Little boys should be seen and not heard"; and "Fingers were made before forks"; and "Little Pitchers have long ears"; and

"It is a sin to steal a pin"; and "See a pin and pick it up"-and so forth.

Experience had provided her with lessons too, and she was never tired of reminding Rudd that nothing is ever so bad as we expect it will be. That nothing also is ever so good as we expect, she probably knew too, but being an excellent nurse she did not urge that upon him. Such disenchanting truths can be reserved for one's own acquisition in the school of the world; it is the lenitives with which the instructors of childhood are concerned.

But Sarah was not wholly didactic: she had her moments of levity too; nurses' levity. She and Rudd had tremendous giggling struggles over the ancient and perilous problem contained in the lines:

"Adam and Eve and Pinch-me

Went down to the river to bathe.
Adam and Eve were drowned,

But who do you think was saved?"

On every fine day Rudd and Sarah walked by the sea, which was reached by descending a steep hill.

On very special occasions they went on the pier. Rudd was now and then permitted to fish from it while Sarah sewed. His bait was wet dough from the kitchen, which was placed on two hooks suspended from each end of a stiff wire attached to a weight. He never caught anything, but it was exciting to be at the end of so important a piece of string.

In warm weather he paddled. But the greatest treat of all was to hunt for anemones among the rocks a mile or so from the town and bring them home to live in glass jars. He always kept a piece of seaweed just outside the nursery window to foretell the weather. When his father was away, strange marine creatures often had possession of the bath.

When paddling was not possible, owing to the cold or the high tide, Rudd and Sarah would walk slowly along the Front and study the performers.

Best of all the entertainers Rudd liked Don Patos. Don Patos was a pathetic Spanish nobleman of aristocratic mien. He had moustaches and an imperial waxed at the ends in the manner of Napoleon III. His face was pale and anxious.

Don Patos was unique among the performers. He was pushed to his pitch below the promenade in a bath-chair, the motive power of which was a stout and rather shabby lady who was understood to be his wife. She spoke English and might have been English. When he was established she would begin to shake a tambourine while the Don watched the little band of spectators slowly increasing. When he judged that the crowd was large enough or rich enough he extricated himself by means of a crutch and moved painfully to the centre of the ring. For he had but one leg. There he flung off his black covering and revealed himself garbed in dazzling red and gold, with a large flowing cloak over all. But he revealed more than this, for it was now that the

observer noticed the most wonderful thing about him, which was the remarkable oneness of his one leg. There was no doubt about it; the Don was preeminently a one-legged man. There was not an inch of the other to be seen; it was as non-existent as that of a resting stork.

Don Patos, having arranged his draperies, would make as stately an obeisance as a one-legged man can do and far more stately, owing to his aristocratic mien, than many a biped—and begin to revolve on his solitary foot, while his wife beat and rattled the tambourine with more energy and more.

Faster and faster would the Don rotate, while his cloak flew out all around him: a magnificent and melancholy human top.

But his culminating achievement was the arum-lily dance. For this he exchanged his coloured cloak for a white one, and whirled and twirled on his solitary foot until the cloak resembled the chalice and his head and shoulders the pistil of that funereal flower.

He would then gradually subside until he came to a standstill again, again bow and hop back to his bath-chair, from which he would look with grave and faintly appealing eyes at the spectators as his wife passed among them with her tambourine, now transformed into an offertory plate.

One-legged, and absurd as was his performance, the Don never lost dignity. How often a day he gyrated, I cannot say, but never enough for Rudd, who tore himself away from the Don with difficulty,