ered for a while,
and could see no objection. "Come down and sup with us," he said;
"and afterwards, if the missus agrees, you can take a stroll.
But don't make too much noise when you let yourself in again."

'Well, so it was fixed; and after supper the lad put on a pair of
high-lows my grandfather lent him, and started off for a ramble in
the night air, with a plenty of instructions about the safest paths.
At nine o'clock, which was their regular hour, my grandfather and
grandmother made out the light and went to bed, leaving the door on
the latch. It was an hour before my grandfather could get to sleep.
He was thinking of the five guineas, and how they ought rightfully to
be divided.

'At five in the morning his wife woke him, and declared that in her
belief the lad was still abroad. If he had returned and gone to his
garret she must have heard; but she had heard nothing. She harped on
this till my grandfather climbed out and went to the garret for a
look; and sure enough the bed was empty.

'They lay awake till daylight, the pair of them, cogitating this and
that. But when the dawn came, my grandfather could stand it no
longer. He pulled on his breeches and boots, went downstairs, and
had scarcely thrown open the door before he heard screams and saw a
wretched figure, naked to the shirt, running across the yard towards
the house. It was Nathan the Jew, and he tumbled in front of my
grandfather, and caught hold of him by the boots while he yelled for
mercy.

'What do you suppose, was the explanation? My grandfather could
scarcely make head or tail of it, even after listening to the Jew's
story. And neither he nor my grandmother ever set eyes on the
prisoner lad again. But about nine months later there came a letter
from America that helped to clear things up.

'The poor boy--so he wrote in his letter--being turned loose under
the sky after fifteen months of captivity, just couldn't go back to
the garret. Though the night was pitch black and full of mist, and
the stars hidden, he wanted no more than to pace to and fro, and look
up and open his chest to it. To and fro he went, a bit farther each
time, but always keeping my grandfather's directions somewhere at the
back of his mind, and always searching back till he could see the
glimmer of whitewash showing him where the house stood. In the
letter he sent to my grandmother he told very freely of the thoughts
that came to him there while he felt his