hristian had justified her adoption by
a stealthy and successful raid upon the opposition gravel heap. A
long and savage series of engagements had ensued, that alternated
between flights, and what Christian, blending recollections of
nursery doctoring with methods of Indian warfare, designated
"stomach-attacks." It was while engaged in one of the latter forms
of assault that Christian was captured, and, being abandoned by her
comrades, was haled by the captors before Richard, the Eldest
Statesmen. A packed Court-martial of enemies speedily found the
prisoner guilty, and the delicious determining of the punishment
absorbed the attention of the Court. John, with a poet's fancy,
suggested that the criminal should be compelled to lick a worm.
Judith, more practical, advocated her being sent to the house to
steal some jam. "I forgot to," she said.

The Court was held in the Council Chamber, a space between the birches
and hazels on the bank of the Ownashee; a fair and green room, ceiled
with tremulous leaves, encircled and made secret by high bracken, out
of which rose the tarnished-silver stems of the birch trees and the
multitudinous hazel-boughs, and furnished with boulders of limestone,
planted deep in a green fleece of mingled moss and grass. On one side
only was it open to the world, yet on that same side it was most
effectively divided from it, by the swift brown stream, speeding down
to the big river, singing its shallow summer song as it sped.

Richard, Eldest Statesman, gazed in dark reflection upon the prisoner,
meditating her sentence; the prisoner, young enough to tremble in the
suspense, old enough to enjoy the nerve-tension and the moment of
drama, gazed back at him. Her hair lay in damp rings, and hung in
rats'-tails about her forehead. Her small face, with the silver-clear
skin, stippled here and there with tiny freckles, was faintly flushed,
and moist with the effort of her last great but unavailing run for
freedom; her wide eyes were like brown pools scooped from the brown
flow of the Ownashee.

"I adjudge," said Richard, in an awful voice, "that the prisoner shall
amass three buckets of the best gravel. The same to be taken from the
shallow by the seventh stepping-stone."

The prisoner's little brown arm, with a hand thin and brown as a
monkey's, went up; the recognised protest.

"Not the seventh, most noble Samurai," she said, anxiously; "Won't it
do from the strand?"

"I have spoken," replied th