d drove away. Joe
was welcomed home by a thrashing, which he remembers in old age.

The episode bore fruit in several ways. To begin with, Master Joe was
packed off to a distant school, far from that to which young Reddy was
sent. But the boys found each other out in the holidays, and became
firm friends on the sly, and Joe was so loyal and admiring that he never
ceased to talk to his one confidante of the courage, the friendliness,
the generosity, the agility, and skill of his secret hero. The
confidante was his sister Julia, to whom the young hereditary enemy
became a synonym for whatever is lovely and of good report. She used
to look at him in church--she had little other opportunity of observing
him--and would think in her childish innocent mind how handsome and
noble he looked. He did not speak like the Barfield boys, or look like
them, or walk like them. He was a young prince, heir to vast estates,
and a royal title in fairyland. If story-books were few and far between,
the sentimental foolish widow, Jenny Busker, was a mine of narrative,
and a single fairy tale is enough to open all other fairy lore to a
child's imagination. If the little girl worshipped the boy, he, in his
turn, looked kindly down on her. He had fought for her once at odds of
two to one, and he gave her a smile now and then. It happened that in
this wise began the curious, half-laughable, and half-pathetic little
history which buried the hatreds of the Castle Barfield Capulet and
Montague for ever.

III

In this Castle Barfield version of Romeo and Juliet the parody would
have been impossible without the aid and intervention of some sort of
Friar Laurence. He was a notability of those parts in those days, and he
was known as the Dudley Devil. In these enlightened times he would have
been dealt with as a rogue and vagabond, and, not to bear too hardly
upon an historical personage, whom there is nobody (even with all our
wealth of historical charity-mongers) to whitewash, he deserved richly
in his own day the treatment he would have experienced in ours. He
discovered stolen property--when his confederates aided him; he put
the eye on people obnoxious to his clients, for a consideration; he
overlooked milch cows, and they yielded blood; he went about in
the guise of a great gray tom-cat. It was historically true in
my childhood--though, like other things, it may have ceased to be
historically true since then--that it was in this disguise o