The beautiful June morning became grey. There was no sound save the piteous bewildered notes of the mother bird, the church bells ringing noisily, and the sobs of a small boy.

Rudd did much thinking for the rest of that morning, and Captain Marryatt had no further chance with him. At lunch he astonished Sarah and nearly choked Mr. Hoadley by asking if he might be excused from eating any roast beef and have only Yorkshire pudding and potatoes, and going on to explain, in reply to a torrent of questions, that he was not ill, but he wanted in future to be a vegetarian.

"That's a good 'un," said Mr. Hoadley. "Why, your teeth will all drop out."

"Why?" Rudd asked in alarm.

"Because it's only biting good meat that keeps them in," said the farmer. "That's what they're for— meat. If we were meant to eat nothing but vegetables we should have been given only gums."

Rudd looked inquiringly at Sarah. Was that so? Sarah confirmed every word of it. "But why do you want to be a vegetarian?" she asked.

"Eating animals is so cruel," Rudd said.

"Then of course you won't be going with me to market to-morrow," remarked Mr. Hoadley.

"Me not going?" Rudd answered with surprise and misgiving.

"How could you bring yourself to take part in selling beasts for folks to eat?" was the Socratic reply.

Rudd felt that he was up against more complexity than the situation had seemed capable of holding, and he consented to eat a slice of beef after all.

But nothing would induce him to stroke the black cat again.

IT

CHAPTER XI

UNCLE BEN'S PHRASE

T is not only perfumes, such as that of lilac, and wallflowers, and lilies of the valley, and wild thyme on the hot hills, and rubbish fires: it is not only sights, such as sunsets and foreign marketplaces, that abide in the memory, unexpectedly and poignantly to revivify the past. It is often sentences too; but whereas sights and scents are retrospective, a sentence can construct and reconcile. No one that Rudd knew used so many of these memorable phrases as Uncle Ben, but one in particular established itself in the boy's brain.

Uncle Ben was spending a night at the Sergisons' when Rudd was ten or eleven.

Uncle Ben was his especial idol, not only because he was keen and sympathetic and full of fun, which Mr. Sergison had never been, but because he alone talked to Rudd as if Rudd was not a child. Rudd was so tired of the grown-ups who descended to him: who called him Little Man, and wished to be taken to the drawing-room door to see by the record kept on the edge of it how much he had grown since they

were there last: who asked what he collected, and submitted problems about a herring and a half.

They were kind, he knew, and they brought chocolates and sixpences; but they carried things no further. Also they had no memories. They said the same thing every time, as if the year had done as little for him as for themselves.

Uncle Ben was not like this. When Uncle Ben talked to Rudd he made no difference in his voice or his words. Sometimes he even said "damn," but he said it so rightly, as if it were the only word, and with such rich heartiness, that even if he had not been Mrs. Sergison's favourite brother, she would hardly have protested.

It is true that when she went up to say good-night to Rudd and give him those last kisses, she sometimes warned him that he must not think that because Uncle Ben could use such words, Rudd had a right to also. But Rudd knew that he hadn't.

Uncle Ben always brought Rudd a present; but it was not like those others. It was something that he would appreciate a little now, and grow to appreciate much more, instead of growing out of. It was Uncle Ben who gave him Pickwick when he was six, and David Copperfield when he was seven, and Thomas Edwards, the Scotch Naturalist, when he was eight, and The Ingoldsby Legends when he was nine, and The Three Musketeers when he was ten.

Uncle Ben also gave him his star map, which by some movable contrivance told him what stars were

to be seen every night in the year, and his map measurer, and his great box of pastels.

Uncle Ben gave him also little pictures for his room-not the coloured soap pictures, or puppies and kittens from Christmas numbers, but beautiful faces after drawings by Leonardo and Raphael, and Dürer's "White Horse," and "St. Jerome," and even the "Melancholia," and Uncle Ben's own favourite Charles Keenes cut from old Punches to be pasted on a screen by Rudd himself.

Uncle Ben brought more life into the house on his infrequent and very brief visits than crept in during the whole year. For he could play on the piano anything that he had heard, and the only fault that Rudd had to find with him was that after sitting down to tell them what the latest comic song in London was like, he would succumb to the opportunity of making melody of his own, and pass off into melancholy improvisations, and so for far too long be lost to any outside influence. Uncle Ben's improvisations not only had no interest for Rudd, but were simply robbing them all of the precious time in which he might be relating, with infinite spirit and monstrous exaggeration, some of his new adventures; for Uncle Ben had adventures as other persons have disappoint

ments.

Rudd's greatest joy of all was to walk out alone with this magical uncle. They always went first to an ancient part of the town known as the Alleys, where the old curiosity dealers congregated, and here