work. They,
therefore, determined to wait till the next Sunday morning when they
knew she would not fail to be at church. Sunday came, and during
service Giles attended. It was a lone house, as I said before, and
the rest of the parish were safe at church. In a trice the tree was
cleared, the bags were filled, the asses were whipped, the thieves
were off, the coast was clear, and all was safe and quiet by the
time the sermon was over.

Unluckily, however, it happened that this tree was so beautiful, and
the fruit so fine, that the people, as they used to pass to and from
the church, were very apt to stop and admire Widow Brown's
red-streaks; and some of the farmers rather envied her that in that
scarce season, when they hardly expected to make a pie out of a
large orchard, she was likely to make a cask of cider from a single
tree. I am afraid, indeed, if I must speak out, she herself rather
set her heart too much upon this fruit, and had felt as much pride
in her tree as gratitude to a good Providence for it; but this
failing of hers was no excuse for Giles. The covetousness of this
thief had for once got the better of his caution; the tree was too
completely stripped, though the youngest boy, Dick, did beg hard
that his father would leave the poor old woman enough for a few
dumplings; and when Giles ordered Dick, in his turn, to shake the
tree, the boy did it so gently that hardly any apples fell, for
which he got a good stroke of the stick with which the old man was
beating down the apples.

The neighbors, on their return from church, stopped as usual, but it
was not, alas! to admire the apples, for apples there were none
left, but to lament the robbery, and console the widow. Mean time
the red-streaks were safely lodged in Giles's hovel under a few
bundles of new hay which he had contrived to pull from a farmer's
mow the night before for the use of his jack-asses. Such a stir,
however, began to be made about the widow's apple-tree, that Giles,
who knew how much his character had laid him open to suspicion, as
soon as he saw the people safe in church again in the afternoon,
ordered his boys to carry each a hatful of the apples and thrust
them in a little casement window which happened to be open in the
house of Samuel Price, a very honest carpenter in that parish, who
was at church with his whole family. Giles's plan, by this
contrivance, was to lay the theft on Price's sons in case the thing
should come to be fu