s to come into the garden three days a
week, and last week I only set eyes on you twice, and here's half the
week gone and you've only been once."

"Look here," said Peter Cribb, a hard-looking bullet-headed man of
five-and-twenty; and he leaned on his broom, and twisted one very
tightly trousered leg round the other, "do you think I can sit upon the
box o' that there wagginette, drivin' miles away, and be sweeping this
here lawn same time!"

"Master said as it was your dooty to be in this garden three days a
week; and t'other three days you was to do your stable-work--there."

"Didn't I go out with the carriage every day this week?"

"I don't know when you went out with the carriage, and when you didn't,"
said Dan'l; "all I know is as my lawn didn't get swept; and how the
doctor expects a garden like this here to be kept tidy without help, I
should be glad to know."

"Well, you'd better go and grumble at him, and not worry me, and--pst!
Lookye there."

He pointed with his broom, and both men remained paralysed at the sight
which met their eyes.

It was not so much from its extraordinary nature as from what Dan'l
afterwards spoke of as its "imperence." That last, he said, was what
staggered him, that any human boy should, in the very middle of the day,
dare to do such a thing in his garden.

He said _his_ garden, for when speaking of it the doctor seemed to be
only some one who was allowed to walk through it for a treat.

What the two men gazed at was the figure of a boy, in shirt and
trousers, going up the vinery roof, between where the early and the late
houses joined and there was a sloping brick coping. From this they saw
him reach the big wall against which the vinery was built, and there he
sat for a few moments motionless.

"Why, who is he?" said Peter, in a whisper. "He went up that vinery
just like a monkey."

Peter had never seen a monkey go up the roof of a vinery, but Dan'l did
not notice that.

"Hold your row," said Dan'l, in a low voice; "don't speak, and we'll
ketch my nabs. Now we know where my peaches went last year."

"But who is he!" whispered Peter.

"I don't know, and I don't care, but I mean to have him as sure as he's
there. Now if master hadn't been so precious 'tickler about a gun, I
could ha' brought him down like a bird."

"Lookye there," cried Peter. "See that?"

"Oh yes, I see him," said Dan'l, as the figure ran easily along the top
of the twelve-foot wall on all-f