ooths, across the grass, and along the roadway,
loitered a sad-coloured, country crowd. Even to the children, it took
its pleasure slowly and silently; save in the case of a hulking, young
carter in a smock-frock, who, being pretty far gone in liquor,
alternately shouted bawdy songs and offered invitation to the company
generally to come on and have its head punched.

Such were the pictures that impressed themselves upon Richard's brain
as Henry led the dancing carriage-horses up the road. And it must be
owned that from this first sight of life, as the common populations
live it, his soul revolted. Delicately nurtured, finely bred, his
sensibility accentuated by the prickings of that thorn in the flesh
which was so intimate a part of his otherwise noble heritage, the
grossness and brutality of much which most boys of his age have already
learnt to take for granted affected him to the point of loathing. And
more especially did he loathe the last picture presented to him on the
outskirts of the common. At the door of a gaudily-painted van, somewhat
apart from the rest, stood a strapping lass, tambourine in one hand,
tin mug for the holding of pennies in the other. She wore a black,
velvet bodice, rusty with age, and a blue, silk skirt of doubtful
cleanliness, looped up over a widely distended scarlet petticoat. Rows
of amber beads encircled her brown throat. She laughed and leered,
bold-eyed and coarsely alluring, at a couple of sheepish country lads
on the green below. She called to them, pointing over her shoulder with
the tin cup, to the sign-board of her show. At the painting on that
board Richard Calmady gave one glance. His lips grew thin and his face
white. He jerked at the reins, causing the horses to start and swerve.
Was it possible that, as old Jackie Deeds said, God Almighty had His
jokes too, jokes at the expense of His own creation? That in cynical
abuse of human impotence, as a wanton pastime, He sent human beings
forth into the world thus ludicrously defective? The thought was
unformulated. It amounted hardly to a thought indeed,--was but a blind
terror of insecurity, which, coursing through the boy's mind, filled
him with agonised and angry pity towards all disgraced fellow-beings,
all enslaved and captive beasts. Dimly he recognised his kinship to all
such.

Meanwhile the carriage bowled along the smooth road and up the long
hill, bordered by fir and beech plantations, which leads to Spendle
Flats. And