? You know I do not
grudge it. I don't like you to stay up so late to earn it, when you
ought to be resting."

"Well, I wouldn't mind another five shillings, mother."

The mother gives him a half-sovereign and kisses him.

Percy, as he walks up the stairs, ruminating on his good luck, feels
considerably more self-respect when he looks at the two half-crowns than
when looking at the half-sovereign.

At the top of the stairs he shouts down to Walker:--

"I say, wake me at six, will you? and leave my waterproof and top-boots
on the hall table; and, I say, tell Mason to cut me a dozen strong ash
sticks about a yard long; and, I say, leave a hammer and some tacks on
the hall table too; and tell Appleby to go by the early coach to
Overstone and get me a pound of cork, and some whalebone, and some tar.
Here's five shillings to pay for them. Don't forget. Tell him to leave
them at the lodge before twelve, and I'll fetch them. Oh, and tell Raby
if she wants to see what I was telling her about, she had better hang
about the lodge till I come. I'm sure to be there somewhere between
twelve and four."

With which the young lord of creation retires to his cubicle, leaving
Walker scratching his head, and regarding the five shillings in his hand
in anything but a joyful mood.

"He ought to be put on the treadmill a week or two; that's what would do
him good," observed the sage retainer to himself; "one thing at a time,
and plenty of it. A dozen ash sticks before six o'clock in the morning!
What does he want with ash sticks? Now his schoolmaster, if he'd got
one, would find them particular handy."

With which little joke Walker goes off to agitate Appleby and Mason with
the news of their early morning duties, and to put the servants' hall in
a flutter by announcing for the fiftieth time that summer that either he
or the young master would have to leave Wildtree Towers, because,
positively--well, they would understand--a man's respect for himself
demanded that he should draw the line somewhere, and that was just what
Master Percy would not allow him to do.

We have changed the scene once already in this chapter. Just before we
finish let us change it once more, and leaving beautiful Wildtree and
its happy family, let us fly to a sorry, tumbledown, desolate shed five
miles away, on the hill-side. It may have once belonged to a farm, or
served as a shelter for sheep on the mountain-slopes. But it now
scarcely possesse