icacies of the
English language; and Sudley, as he plodded homeward with his rifle on
his shoulder, his dog running on in advance, and Leander pattering
along behind, was often moved to add the weight of his admonition to the
teacher's reproof.

"Lee-yander," he would gently drawl, "ye mustn't be so bad, honey; ye
_mustn't_ be so turr'ble bad."

"Naw, ma'am, I won't," Leander would cheerily pipe out, and so the
procession would wend its way along.

For he still confused the gender in titles of respect, and from force of
habit he continued to do so in addressing Tyler Sudley for many a year
after he had learned better.

These lapses were pathetic rather than ridiculous in the hunter's ears.
It was he who had taught Leander every observance of verbal humility
toward his wife, in the forlorn hope of propitiating her in the interest
of the child, who, however, with his quick understanding that the
words sought to do honor and express respect, had of his own accord
transferred them to his one true friend in the household. The only
friend he had in the world, Sudley often felt, with a sigh over the
happy child's forlorn estate. And, with the morbid sensitiveness
peculiar to a tender conscience, he winced under the knowledge that it
was he who, through wrong-headedness or wrongheartedness, had contrived
to make all the world besides the boy's enemy. Both wrongheaded and
wronghearted he was, he sometimes told himself. For even now it still
seemed to him that he had not judged amiss, that only the perversity of
fate had thwarted him. Was it so fantastically improbable, so hopeless
a solace that he had planned, that he should have thought his wife might
take comfort for the death of their own child in making for its sake a
home for another, orphaned, forlorn, a burden, and a glad riddance to
those into whose grudging charge it had been thrown? This bounty of hope
and affection and comfort had seemed to him a free gift from the dead
baby's hands, who had no need of it since coming into its infinite
heritage of immortality, to the living waif, to whom it was like life
itself, since it held all the essential values of existence. The idea
smote him like an inspiration. He had ridden' twenty miles in a snowy
night to beg the unwelcome mite from the custody of its father's
half-brothers, who were on the eve of moving to a neighboring county
with all their kin and belongings.

Tyler Sudley was a slow man, and tenacious of impressi