strange fixed stare as he wrote,--not keeping his eyes
on the paper, as Lenny had been taught to do when he sat down to his
copy-book. The fact is, that Randal Leslie was tired and faint, and he
felt the shock of his fall the more, after the few paces he had walked,
so that he was glad to rest himself a few moments; and he took that
opportunity to write a line to Frank, to excuse himself for not
calling again, intending to tear the leaf on which he wrote out of
his pocket-book and leave it at the first cottage he passed, with
instructions to take it to the Hall.

While Randal was thus innocently engaged, Lenny came up to him, with the
firm and measured pace of one who has resolved, cost what it may, to do
his duty. And as Lenny, though brave, was not ferocious, so the anger he
felt and the suspicions he entertained only exhibited themselves in the
following solemn appeal to the offender's sense of propriety,--"Ben't
you ashamed of yourself? Sitting on the squire's new stocks! Do get up,
and go along with you!"

Randal turned round sharply; and though, at any other moment, he would
have had sense enough to extricate himself very easily from his false
position, yet Nemo mortalium, etc. No one is always wise. And Randal was
in an exceedingly bad humour. The affability towards his inferiors,
for which I lately praised him, was entirely lost in the contempt for
impertinent snobs natural to an insulted Etonian.

Therefore, eying Lenny with great disdain, Randal answered briefly,--

"You are an insolent young blackguard."

So curt a rejoinder made Lenny's blood fly to his face. Persuaded before
that the intruder was some lawless apprentice or shop-lad, he was now
more confirmed in that judgment, not only by language so uncivil, but by
the truculent glance which accompanied it, and which certainly did
not derive any imposing dignity from the mutilated, rakish, hang-dog,
ruinous hat, under which it shot its sullen and menacing fire.

Of all the various articles of which our male attire is composed, there
is perhaps not one which has so much character and expression as the top
covering. A neat, well-brushed, short-napped, gentlemanlike hat, put on
with a certain air, gives a distinction and respectability to the whole
exterior; whereas, a broken, squashed, higgledy-piggledy sort of a hat,
such as Randal Leslie had on, would go far towards transforming the
stateliest gentleman who ever walked down St. James's Street into the