the good in the world."

And then the boy, all ideas of the difference between a Police trooper
and the Resident Magistrate forgotten for the time, opened his heart,
and got back to his home in the pleasant English country, and his
schooldays, only, comparatively speaking, a matter of yesterday. He had
not been coddled either, but had had to take the rough with the smooth--
and more rough than smooth--therein. And eagerly and enthusiastically
did he let himself go to his older listeners, his fellow-captives, here,
in the night-gloom of this savage hut, lighted only by the dimness of
the dying fire: forgetting everything, forgetting that he might never
see that English home again; might never see the setting of another sun;
and causing them almost to forget it too. Poor boy! Poor boy!

He was eloquent on the big trout he had taken out of the mill-pool in
the rippling moonlight in the sweet early summer, with a white moth; the
big two-and-a-half pounder he had tried for so often; on the
sparrow-hawk's nest in the straight, slippery stemmed Scotch fir on the
border of the most carefully watched covert of the countryside, also in
the moonlight, and the hanging on by one hand--for an awful half minute
to a greasy, slippery bough, with sixty feet of clear drop beneath him--
on his brothers and sisters, and the first pipe which he and two of the
former had smoked, with doubtful satisfaction, in the depths of a
clay-sided ditch overhung with brambles, a little way below the vicarage
garden--on the splendid old copper-beech beneath which they used to take
tea on sultry summer afternoons. Elvesdon, listening sympathetically,
encouraged him to talk on--Thornhill was already snoring. At last the
boy himself grew drowsy.

"Well, Mr Elvesdon, I'm keeping you awake," he said. "But I can't tell
you how kind you have been to me. I hope, if we get out of this, and
you are ever in England you will go and see my people, and I hope still
more that I shall, by some chance or other, be there too to welcome you.
I'm so thankful we're together again; it was awfully lonely stuck away
there all by myself among these brutes."

"Why Parry, that's a first-rate after-dinner speech," laughed Elvesdon,
dropping a kindly hand on the lad's shoulder. "I hope all that you say,
too. And now--go to sleep."

The other obeyed. Elvesdon however, sitting there, did not feel in the
least inclined to follow suit. He felt uncomfortably wakeful, and