Then we ran down this lane for some way, until the Scamp suddenly pulled up short, telling us to stop too.

"This way, boys!" he said, pushing open a gate leading into a small paddock, containing a large number of apple-trees. "Had the Scamp brought us here to steal apples?" I thought to myself, as I looked up at the boughs, bending low under their burden of bright golden and red fruit. Impossible! for though, only lately, we had been reading aloud a tale of schoollife, in which the hero had deliberately headed a band of boys determined to rob a neighbouring orchard, I did not believe the Scamp could be guilty of copying such an unworthy example, wild as he was. Besides, he knew that apples offered no special temptation to me, and therefore, if such had been his intention, he was scarcely likely to have proposed me as one of his accomplices.

Yet, though I almost hated myself for harbouring even a suspicion of such a nature against my friend, I could not prevent the thought passing through my mind, particularly as I could divine no other possible reason for such queer conduct.

"Now follow me close, make no noise, and don't talk, whatever else you do!" he said, leading us away from the trees, straight towards the wooden shed; so, obviously, my fear had been a groundless one.

Every now and then he stopped to listen, holding up his hand with an air of warning, if either of us chanced to crack a dead twig beneath our feet, or incautiously kicked away a loose

stone.

At length we were close underneath the building, waiting patiently, while the Scamp peered anxiously through the chinks between the boards, to satisfy himself, apparently, that the shed was empty.

"All right!" he said, beckoning to us over his shoulder. "Come along."

And squashing between the shed and the hedge against which

H

it was erected, we were soon completely hidden by the growth of underwood, springing up so thickly from the dry ditch over which we crouched.

"What have you brought us here for, and what are we to do now?" I asked, pulling out a thorn which had stuck into my finger-fortunately not deeply-during our passage through the

bushes.

"You'll see, most likely. You must each get where there's a hole that you can see through, and mind you don't call out, whatever happens; because we are safe enough, here, if you don't either of you make a sound. No one can possibly see us, it's so thick; but there is a gap a bit further down that we can run for, if it should be necessary to slope-which it won't be, if you both keep perfectly quiet."

I felt dimly alarmed at all this possibility of something exciting happening, but apparently Harry did not share my apprehensions, for, after taking a deliberate survey through a tiny hole, he said, coolly, "Why, there's nothing in there but a heap of rubbish, and a couple of donkeys, and carts, and all that sort of thing."

"You wait and see!" replied the Scamp, mysteriously.

So we sat patiently on, most of the time in perfect silence, for what seemed to me like an hour. In reality, I daresay, it was considerably under twenty minutes.

Then the sudden sound of dead leaves and dry brambles, crunching under the tread of heavy footsteps, made my heart leap into my mouth, for the sounds were close at hand.

"He's coming!" cried the Scamp, excitedly, under his breath. "Don't stir, for the life of you!"

It was Rylands who entered; the "Lanky Man," as we used always to call him—an unusually tall and thin man, “all arms and legs," as the Scamp used often to say of Willie Knowles. He was apparently middle-aged, though possibly his grizzly hair and deep-set eyes may have made him look older

grey

than he really was; his hollow cheeks, too, were grimy with coal dust, for amongst the variety of uses to which his ill-kept, hardly-used animals were put, was that of dragging heavy cartloads of coal from door to door, amongst the villages scattered around.

The half-starved donkeys instinctively shrunk away from him as they saw him enter, turning their meek, sufferinglooking eyes upon him, as though they would have besought him to spare them, for once, the torture of the customary digin-the-ribs from the short, sharp stick he carried, with which he usually saluted them as he passed.

Strange to say, their dumb request was, at any rate, partially answered this evening, for he merely picked up a dry clod of earth, and flung it carelessly at them, causing them to trot doggedly off to the other end of the shed, where they huddled close together again, waiting, with quiet, patient fear, the result of his next movement.

Just now, however, he seemed to be intent upon some other sport than that of cruelly worrying his hapless dependents, and, with a half-muttered oath, he strode on, until he came so close to where I was sitting, watching, in a state of nervous agitation lest we should be discovered, that I expect I should have heedlessly proclaimed our presence by a sudden cry of alarm, had not my very fear almost restrained the use of my faculties.

It was so strange, so weird! The gloom of the building, the forbidding, scaring aspect of the man, and his coarse behaviour, as well as the bitter knowledge that we were doing wrong in thus being "out of bounds" at all, and trespassers too, moreover, all combined to work me up to the highest pitch of fear and excitement.

Still I watched on at my hole, never daring to move a muscle, though my limbs were aching all over from the strain of preserving, for so long a time, the same position.

Rylands at once proceeded to pull away a portion of a stack

of fagots, piled unsuspiciously against the opposite side of the shed, leaving exposed, as he did so, a large square board, to which was attached, by way of a handle, a long loop of stout iron wire.

Stooping down, he lifted this away, and from the cavity beneath, pulled forth some long, black objects, not very easily distinguishable in this dim light.

A faint perception of the Scamp's mysterious design in bringing us to this odd place, now gradually dawned across my brain, making me shudder with an agony of dread, as the light broke slowly in upon my mind.

A sudden, irresistible cry rose to my lips, but happily died away again, before its utterance had hurled us abruptly into an unknown, terrible danger. A desire to cry, rather than an actual sound; a gasping, catching breath, such as wakes one sometimes, startled and afraid—one knows not why-from a restless, disturbed slumber.

Only how could Sam have had any clue to this solution of the dreaded mystery?

But this was no place for questioning him, and, in the meantime, I could scarcely feel more shocked and bewildered, by any fresh revelations, than I did at that moment, when I instinctively knew myself to be for the second time-nay for the fiftieth, more probably, but wholly unconscious of the fact -in the awful presence of "Springall Jack."

Yes! there are his boots! for now he is pulling them on, muttering to himself the while; and in another minute he will be upon his feet once more, equipped in those instruments of such terrible torture to the nervous and the weak.

A horrid thought flashed through my brain.

What if he were intending to practise leaping the very hedge under which we were seated?

But no. He would scarcely dare to hazard an experiment so dangerous to his own safety, in broad daylight, even