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"How can I

"Heaven forgive me!" thought the other. resign this angel's good opinion? Surely Heaven sends this blessed dew to my parched heart!" And now she burned to make good her promise, and earn this virtuous wife's love. She folded her once more in her arms, and then, taking her by the hand, led her tenderly into Triplet's inner room. She made her lie down on the bed, and placed pillows high for her like a mother, and leaned over her as she lay, and pressed her lips gently to her forehead. Her fertile brain had already digested a plan, but she had resolved that this pure and candid soul should take no lessons of deceit. "Lie there," said she, "till I open the door, and then join us. Do you know what I am going to do? I am not going to restore you your husband's heart, but to show you it never really left you."

JOHN RIDD AND THE DOONES.

BY RICHARD DODDRIDGE BLACKMORE.

(From "Lorna Doone.")

[RICHARD DODdridge BlackmORE: This well-known English novelist was born at Longworth, Berkshire, June 9, 1825. He received his education at Tiverton and Exeter College, Oxford, where he graduated in 1847. At first a conveyancer, he has mainly devoted himself to literature. His reputation is founded principally upon "Lorna Doone: a Romance of Exmoor" (1869), one of the most interesting historical novels of the century. He has also written: "Craddock Nowell," "The Maid of Sker," "Cripps the Carrier," "Mary Anerley," "Sir Thomas Upmore," "Springhaven," "Kit and Kitty," "Perlycross," "Dariel," "Slain by the Doones, and Other Stories." Among his poetical works are: a translation of Virgil's "Georgics," "Fate of Franklin," and "Fringilla."]

WHEN I was turned fourteen years old, and put into good smallclothes, buckled at the knee, and strong blue worsted hosen, knitted by my mother, it happened to me without choice, I may say, to explore the Bagworthy water. And it came about in this wise:

My mother had long been ailing, and not well able to eat much; and there is nothing that frightens us so much as for people to have no love of their victuals. Now I chanced to remember that once at the time of the holidays I had brought

corns.

dear mother from Tiverton a jar of pickled loaches, caught by myself in the Lowman River, and baked in the kitchen oven, with vinegar, a few leaves of bay, and about a dozen pepperAnd mother had said that in all her life she had never tasted anything fit to be compared with them. Whether she said so good a thing out of compliment to my skill in catching the fish and cooking them, or whether she really meant it, is more than I can tell, though I quite believe the latter, and so would most people who tasted them; at any rate, I now resolved to get some loaches for her, and do them in the selfsame manner, just to make her eat a bit.

There are many people, even now, who have not come to a right knowledge what a loach is, and where he lives, and how to catch and pickle him. And I will not tell them all about it, because if I did, very likely there would be no loaches left ten or twenty years after the appearance of this book. A pickled minnow is very good, if you catch him in a stickle, with the scarlet fingers upon him; but I count him no more than the ropes in beer compared with a loach done properly.

Being resolved to catch some loaches, whatever trouble it cost me, I set forth without a word to any one, in the forenoon of St. Valentine's day, 1675-6, I think it must have been. Annie should not come with me, because the water was too cold; for the winter had been long, and snow lay here and there in patches in the hollow of the banks, like a lady's gloves forgotten. And yet the spring was breaking forth, as it always does in Devonshire, when the turn of the days is over; and though there was little to see of it, the air was full of feeling.

It puzzles me now that I remember all those young impressions so, because I took no heed of them at the time whatever; and yet they come upon me bright, when nothing else is evident in the gray fog of experience. I am like an old man gazing at the outside of his spectacles, and seeing, as he rubs the dust, the image of his grandson playing at bopeep with him.

But let me be of any age, I never could forget that day, and how bitter cold the water was. For I doffed my shoes and hose, and put them into a bag about my neck, and left my little coat at home, and tied my shirt sleeves back to my shoulders. Then I took a three-pronged fork firmly bound to a rod with cord, and a piece of canvas kerchief with a lump of bread inside it; and so went into the pebbly water, trying to think how warm it was. For more than a mile all down the Lynn

stream, scarcely a stone I left unturned, being thoroughly skilled in the tricks of the loach, and knowing how he hides himself. For, being gray-spotted, and clear to see through, and something like a cuttlefish, only more substantial, he will stay quite still where a streak of weed is in the rapid water, hoping to be overlooked, not caring even to wag his tail. Then, being disturbed, he flips away, like whalebone from the finger, and hies to a shelf of stone, and lies with his sharp head poked in under it; or sometimes he bellies him into the mud, and only shows his back ridge. And that is the time to spear him nicely, holding the fork very gingerly, and allowing for the bent of it, which comes to pass, I know not how, at the tickle of air and water.

Or, if your loach should not be abroad when first you come to look for him, but keeping snug in his little home, then you may see him come forth amazed at the quivering of the shingles and oar himself and look at you, and then dart upstream, like a little gray streak; and then you must try to mark him in, and follow very daintily. So after that, in a sandy place, you steal up behind his tail to him, so that he cannot set eyes on you, for his head is upstream always, and there you see him abiding still, clear, and mild and affable. Then, as he looks so innocent, you make full sure to prog him well, in spite of the wry of the water, and the sun making elbows to everything, and the trembling of your fingers. But when you gird at him lovingly, and have as good as gotten him, lo! in the go by of the river he is gone as a shadow goes, and only a little cloud of mud curls away from the points of the fork.

A long way down that limpid water, chill and bright as an iceberg, went my little self that day on man's choice errand destruction. All the young fish seemed to know that I was one who had taken out God's certificate, and meant to have the value of it; every one of them was aware that we desolate more than replenish the earth. For a cow might come and look into the water, and put her yellow lips down; a kingfisher, like a blue arrow, might shoot through the dark alleys over the channel, or sit on a dipping withy bough, with his beak sunk into his breast feathers; even an otter might float downstream, likening himself to a log of wood, with his flat head flush with the water top, and his oily eyes peering quietly; and yet no panic would seize other life, as it does when a sample of man comes.

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