the panel.

What a sight! 'there were Sossy and Minthy intrenched in a Sebastopol
which must have cost a good half-hour's engineering, and the terrible
Bytes Gridley besieging the fortress with hostile manifestations of the
most singular character. He was actually discharging a large sugar-plum
at the postern gate, which having been left unclosed, the missile would
certainly have reached one of the garrison, when he paused as the door
opened, and the great round spectacles and four wide, staring infants'
eyes were levelled at Miss Susan Posey.

She almost forgot her errand, grave as it was, in astonishment at this
manifestation. The old man had emptied his shelves of half their folios
to build up the fort, in the midst of which he had seated the two
delighted and uproarious babes. There was his Cave's "Historia
Literaria," and Sir Walter Raleigh's "History of the World," and a whole
array of Christian Fathers, and Plato, and Aristotle, and Stanley's book
of Philosophers, with Effigies, and the Junta Galen, and the Hippocrates
of Foesius, and Walton's Polyglot, supported by Father Sanchez on one
side and Fox's "Acts and Monuments" on the other,--an odd collection, as
folios from lower shelves are apt to be.

The besieger discharged his sugar-plum, which was so well aimed that it
fell directly into the lap of Minthy, who acted with it as if the
garrison had been on short rations for some time.

He saw at once, on looking up, that there was trouble. "What now, Susan
Posey, my dear?"

"O Mr. Gridley, I am in such trouble! What shall I do? What shall I
do?"

She turned back the name and the bottom of the letter in such a way that
Mr. Gridley could read nothing but the few lines relating their
adventure.

"So Mr. Clement Lindsay has been saving a life, has he, and got some hard
knocks doing it, hey, Susan Posey? Well, well, Clement Lindsay is a
brave fellow, and there is no need of hiding his name, my child. Let me
take the letter again a moment, Susan Posey. What is the date of it?
June 16th. Yes,--yes,--yes!"

He read the paragraph over again, and the signature too, if he wanted to;
for poor Susan had found that her secret was hardly opaque to those round
spectacles and the eyes behind them, and, with a not unbecoming blush,
opened the fold of the letter before she handed it back.

"No, no, Susan Posey. He will come all right. His writing is steady,
and if he had broken any bones he would have mentio