I GO ON A HONEYMOON.

XI. FLIGHT.

XII. I FALL AMONG SMUGGLERS.

XIII. THE MAN IN THE VERANDAH.

XIV. THE MOCK-ORANGE BUSH.

XV. MINDEN COTTAGE.

XVI. MR. JACK ROGERS AS A MAN OF AFFAIRS.

XVII. LYDIA BELCHER INTERVENES.

XVIII. THE OWL'S CRY.

XIX. CHECKMATE.

XX. ISABEL'S REVENGE.

XXI. I GO CAMPAIGNING WITH LORD WELLINGTON.

XXII. ON THE GREATER TESSON.

XXIII. IN CIUDAD RODRIGO.

XXIV. I EXCHANGE THE LAUREL FOR THE OLIVE.

CHAPTER I.

I FIND MYSELF A FOUNDLING.

My earliest recollections are of a square courtyard surrounded by
high walls and paved with blue and white pebbles in geometrical
patterns--circles, parallelograms, and lozenges. Two of these walls
were blank, and had been coped with broken bottles; a third,
similarly coped, had heavy folding doors of timber, leaden-grey in
colour and studded with black bolt-heads. Beside them stood a
leaden-grey sentry-box, and in this sat a red-faced man with a wooden
leg and a pigtail, whose business was to attend to the wicket and
keep an eye on us small boys as we played. He owned two books which
he read constantly: one was Foxe's _Martyrs_, and the other (which
had no title on the binding) I opened one day and found to be
_The Devil on Two Sticks_.

The arch over these gates bore two gilt legends. That facing the
roadway ran: "_Train up a Child in the Way he should Go,_" which
prepared the visitor to read on the inner side: "_When he is Old he
will not Depart from it._" But we twenty-five small foundlings, who
seldom evaded the wicket, and so passed our days with the second half
of the quotation, found in it a particular and dreadful meaning.

The fourth and last wall was the front of the hospital, a
two-storeyed building of grey limestone, with a clock and a small
cupola of copper, weather-greened, and a steeply pitched roof of
slate pierced with dormer windows, behind one of which (because of a
tendency to walk in my sleep) I slept in the charge of Miss
Plinlimmon, the matron. Below the eaves ran a line of eight tall
windows, the three on the extreme right belonging to the chapel; and
below these again a low-browed colonnade, in the shelter of which we
played on rainy days, but never in fine weather--though its smooth
limestone slabs made an excellent pitch for marbles, whereas on
the pebbles in the yard expertness could only be attained by