For the rest she loved her son Henry with more than a mother's love; he was as unlike his poor father, bless him, as any child could be.

Henry, although you would never think it to look at him, was not quite like other children; he had been, from his birth, a "little queer, bless his heart," and Mrs.Slater attributed this to the fact that three weeks before the boy's birth, Horny Slater, Senior, had, in a fine frenzy of inebriation, hit her over the head with a chair.

"Dead drunk, 'e was, and never a thought to the child coming, ''Enery,' I said to him, 'it's the child you're hitting as well as me'; but 'e was too far gone, poor soul, to take a thought." Henry was a fine, robust child, with rosy cheeks and a sturdy, thick-set body.

He had large blue eyes and a happy, pleasant smile, but, although he was six years of age, he could hardly talk at all, and liked to spend the days twirling pieces of string round and round or looking into the fire.

His eyes were unlike the eyes of other children, and in their blue depths there lurked strange apprehensions, strange anticipations, strange remembrances.