glaring impracticability even to his young intelligence. A sweeping
and consummate vengeance for the indignity alone should satisfy him.
Something tremendous must be done; and done without delay. At one moment
he thought of killing all the farmer's cattle; next of killing him;
challenging him to single combat with the arms, and according to the
fashion of gentlemen. But the farmer was a coward; he would refuse. Then
he, Richard Feverel, would stand by the farmer's bedside, and rouse
him; rouse him to fight with powder and ball in his own chamber, in the
cowardly midnight, where he might tremble, but dare not refuse.

"Lord!" cried simple Ripton, while these hopeful plots were raging in
his comrade's brain, now sparkling for immediate execution, and anon
lapsing disdainfully dark in their chances of fulfilment, "how I wish
you'd have let me notch him, Ricky! I'm a safe shot. I never miss. I
should feel quite jolly if I'd spanked him once. We should have had
the beat of him at that game. I say!" and a sharp thought drew Ripton's
ideas nearer home, "I wonder whether my nose is as bad as he says! Where
can I see myself?"

To these exclamations Richard was deaf, and he trudged steadily forward,
facing but one object.

After tearing through innumerable hedges, leaping fences, jumping dykes,
penetrating brambly copses, and getting dirty, ragged, and tired, Ripton
awoke from his dream of Farmer Blaize and a blue nose to the vivid
consciousness of hunger; and this grew with the rapidity of light upon
him, till in the course of another minute he was enduring the extremes
of famine, and ventured to question his leader whither he was being
conducted. Raynham was out of sight. They were a long way down the
valley, miles from Lobourne, in a country of sour pools, yellow brooks,
rank pasturage, desolate heath. Solitary cows were seen; the smoke of
a mud cottage; a cart piled with peat; a donkey grazing at leisure,
oblivious of an unkind world; geese by a horse-pond, gabbling as in
the first loneliness of creation; uncooked things that a famishing boy
cannot possibly care for, and must despise. Ripton was in despair.

"Where are you going to?" he inquired with a voice of the last time of
asking, and halted resolutely.

Richard now broke his silence to reply, "Anywhere."

"Anywhere!" Ripton took up the moody word. "But ain't you awfully
hungry?" he gasped vehemently, in a way that showed the total emptiness
of his stomach.

"No