you an' me, Bill, had come on 'em
unbeknown like, we'd ha' got such a start as might have caused us to
make a noise. But I hadn't time to think much, for it was just then I
got sight o' the gardener."

"Now my plan is," continued Dick, swigging off his beer, and lowering
his voice to a still more confidential tone, as he looked cautiously
round, "my plan is to hang about here till dark, then take to the
nearest plantation, an' wait till the moon goes down, which will be
about two o'clock i' the mornin'--when it will be about time for us to
go in and win."

"All right," said Bill, who was not loquacious.

But Bill was mistaken, for it was all wrong.

There was indeed no one in the public at that early hour of the day to
overhear the muttered conversation of the plotters, and the box in which
they sat was too remote from the bar to permit of their words being
overheard, but there was a broken pane of glass in a window at their
elbow, with a seat outside immediately below it. Just before the
burglars entered the house they had observed this seat, and noticed that
no one was on it; but they failed to note that a small, sleepy-headed
pot-boy lay at full length underneath it, basking in the sunshine and
meditating on nothing--that is, nothing in particular.

At first little Pat paid no attention to the monotonous voices that
growled softly over his head, but one or two words that he caught
induced him to open his eyes very wide, rise softly from his lair and
sit down on the seat, cock one ear intelligently upward, and remain so
absolutely motionless that Dick, had he seen him, might have mistaken
him for a very perfect human "statter."

When little Pat thought that he had heard enough, he slid off the seat,
crawled close along the side of the house, doubled round the corner,
rose up, and ran off towards the parsonage as fast as his little legs
could go.

The Reverend Theophilus Stronghand was a younger son of a family so old
that those families which "came over with the Conqueror" were mere
moderns in comparison. Its origin, indeed, is lost in those mists of
antiquity which have already swallowed up so many millions of the human
race, and seem destined to go on swallowing, with ever-increasing
appetite, to the end of time. The Stronghands were great warriors--of
course. They could hardly have developed into a family otherwise. The
Reverend Theophilus, however, was a man of peace. We do not say this to
his dis