ldn't
keep awake?"

"No, uncle. I suppose I must have been very tired to-night."

"The Vicar's plums last night; my pears to-night. Humph! It's time
that young fruit pirate was caught."

CHAPTER TWENTY SEVEN.

Tom thought the matter over for days as he worked at the speculum now
approaching completion. He had met Pete Warboys twice, but the fellow
looked innocency itself, staring hard and vacantly at him, who longed to
charge him with the theft, but felt that he could not without better
evidence.

Then a bright thought came as he was polishing away opposite his uncle,
and using the finest emery.

"I know," he said to himself, and he waited impatiently to be at
liberty, which was not until after tea.

"Going for a walk, Master Tom?" said David, whom he encountered in the
lane.

"Yes; rather in a hurry now."

"Can't tell him yet, because I'm not sure," thought Tom; and he walked
sharply away for the corner where he had left his uncle in the
bath-chair, and all the memories of that day came back as the various
familiar objects came in view.

"I wonder whether he's quite well again now," said the boy to himself;
"but he can't have been so ill as he thought."

But his walk on that golden orange sunset evening had nothing whatever
to do with his uncle, for, as soon as he reached the bend where the road
began to slope, he struck off to the left in among the trees, trying
hard to follow exactly the same track as that taken by Pete Warboys when
he was pursued.

It was not easy, for the great lad had dodged about among the great
fir-trees in quite a zigzag fashion. Still Tom followed the direction,
with the scaly, pillar-like trunks looking golden-red in the horizontal
rays of the sun, which cast their long shadows in wonderful array, till
it seemed to the boy at last as if he were walking through a quivering
golden mist barred with great strokes of purply black.

"I shan't get there before it begins to be dark," he thought, "for this
can't last. Why, it's like a fiery furnace now burning on great iron
bars." Then there was another change, for the dark-green rough
fir-boughs began to be lit up overhead, and the forest looked brighter
than ever.

A wood of fir-trees is a puzzling place, from the fact that in a mile or
two, consequent upon their regular growth, you may find hundreds,
perhaps thousands, of places exactly alike--the same-looking tall, red,
scaly columns, the same distance apart, the sam