catching sight of his aunt's sun-bonnet up among the
raspberry-canes, he decided (as they say) to play for safety.
So, creeping down to the front door, he slipped under it a letter which he
had spent a solid hour last night in composing; and made his way to the
foreshore, to loaf and smoke a pipe of stolen tobacco and, generally
speaking, make the most of his holiday. The note said--

"Dear Aunt,--Do not weep for me. The sulphur-water made me sick and I
could stand it no longer. So am gone for a Soger. Letters and
remittances will doubtless find me if addressed to the Citadel,
Plymouth. A loving heart is what I hunger for--Your affect, nephew,
Ferdinando Jewell."

"P.S.--On 2nd thoughts I may be able to come back this evening to say
farewell for ever."
"P.S.--Don't sit up."

Now a boy may be a lazy good-for-nothing, and yet (if you'll understand
me) be missed from a garden where there are ladders to fix and mazzard
cherries to pick; and likewise, though liable to be grumbled at, a boy has
his uses in the gathering of cockles. Though she knew him to be an
anointed young humbug, there's no denying that Aunt Barbree had missed
Nandy and his help. She was getting past fifty, and somehow the last ten
days had reminded her of it. . . . The long and short of it was that,
after a couple of hours fruit-picking--and it took her no less to get
together the supply she'd reckoned on for her afternoon customers--she
entered the house with a feeling of stiffness in her back and a feeling
that answered to it elsewhere, that maybe Nandy was a better boy than
she'd given him credit for. Upon top of this feeling she pushed open the
door and spied his letter lying on the mat.

The reading of it turned her hot and cold. She marched straight to the
dairy, where Susannah was busy with the cream-pans, and says she,
loosening her bonnet-strings as she dropped upon a bench, "He was but an
orphan, after all, Susannah: and now we've driven 'en to desperation!"

"Who's been driven to desperation?" asked Susannah.

"Why, Nandy," answered Aunt Barbree, tears brimming her eyes. "Who elst?"

"Piggywig's tail!" said Susannah. "What new yarn has the cheeld been
tellin'?"

"He's my own nephew, and a Furnace upon his mother's side," said Aunt
Barbree; "and I'll trouble you to speak more respectful of your employer's
kin. And he hasn't been tellin' it; he've _written