place to
place, getting little but hard words, though the boy was happy enough,
I believe; for living in the air as we did he took up with every bird
and every beast that he could find, and they seem to know mun for a
friend. Many was the young one that he took and made so tame as could
be.

"Then at last the money began to run short, for all that I was careful,
and that now and again we could earn a little bit; so I minded what old
Betsy Lavacombe had said, and thought I would go back and find she. It
was a long way to go, but we walked on day after day till we got nigh
to the moor, when I chose my road very careful and walked night-times
only till we come to this house. The old Betsy was agone, and the
house was nigh failed to pieces, and I've a-heard since that she was
found drowned in a lime-pit some years back. But I digged under the
table as the old Betsy had said, and there deep down was a box wrapped
up in a sheepskin, full of silver money, and a little gold too. How
she got it, I can't tell, unless she took it from her husband, who had
been a sailor, as she told me once, though sailors isn't given to
saving. So we built up the house again and here I made up my mind to
live, where no one couldn't hurt my boy, for he was shy of grown-up
folks, and children won't leave mun alone.

"So here we've a-been now these many years, and the boy's been so happy
as could be. Jackdaws, hedgehogs, squirrels, deer, naught comes amiss
to mun: and he knows the moor and the woods so well as the deer
themselves. He growed stronger too, though I wouldn't never take him
with me when I went down to the villages to buy meal: but he would
always keep out of sight and wait for me. And I suppose that just
lately he may have been getting a bit better in his head, for he runned
down to join the children that day when I come to Ashacombe, as you
remember; and for all that he was a bit frightened then, he was so took
up with your little lady that I hadn't the heart to keep mun from going
to look at her, though I was always hid not very far from mun. It was
me that your servant saw in the woods the day Jan brought the
bullfinch; but Lord, Lord, I never thought that it would have come to
this."

She stopped, and pulling the clothes aside looked sadly at the sick
man's face. "See there," she said in a hard, changed voice, "that's
how he looked often when we was marching back to Corinner. I thought
that I should never get mun bac