and might sometimes
even amuse themselves with doing them damage. Hence the keeper, John
Adam, whose business it was to look after them, found it his duty to
wage war upon the annual hordes of these invaders; and in their eyes
Adam was a terrible man. He was very long and very lean, with a
flattish yet Roman nose, and rather ill-tempered mouth, while his face
was dead-white and much pitted with the small-pox. He wore corduroy
breeches, a blue coat, and a nightcap striped horizontally with black
and red. The youngsters pretended to determine, by the direction in
which the tassel of it hung, what mood its owner was in; nor is it for
me to deny that their inductions may have led them to conclusions
quite as correct as those of some other scientific observers. At all
events the tassel was a warning, a terror, and a hope. He could not
run very fast, fortunately, for the lean legs within those ribbed grey
stockings were subject to rheumatism, and could take only long not
rapid strides; and if the children had a tolerable start, and had not
the misfortune to choose in their terror an impassable direction, they
were pretty sure to get off. Jamie Duff, the most harmless and
conscientious creature, who would not have injured a young fir upon
any temptation, did take a wrong direction, caught his foot in a hole,
fell into a furze bush, and, nearly paralysed with terror, was seized
by the long fingers of Adam, and ignominiously lifted by a portion of
his garments into the vast aerial space between the ground and the
white, pock-pitted face of the keeper. Too frightened to scream, too
conscious of trespass to make any resistance, he was borne off as a
warning to the rest of the very improbable fate which awaited them.

But the character of Adam was not by any means so frightful in the
eyes of Turkey; and he soon succeeded in partially composing the
trepidation of Elsie, assuring her that as soon as he had put up the
cattle, he would walk over to Adam's house and try to get Jamie off,
whereupon Elsie set off home with her cow, disconsolate but hopeful. I
think I see her yet--for I recall every picture of that lovely day
clear as the light of that red sunset--walking slowly with her head
bent half in trouble, half in attention to her knitting, after her
solemn cow, which seemed to take twice as long to get over the ground
because she had two pairs of legs instead of one to shuffle across it,
dragging her long iron chain with the short