But an instinctive premonition warned him that the sands in Time's hour-glass were for him running to an end,--there was no leisure left to him now for any new scheme or plan by which he could improve or strengthen that which he had already accomplished.

He realised this fully, with a passing pang of regret which soon tempered itself into patient resignation,--and as the first arrowy beam of the rising sun shot upwards from the east, he slowly turned his back on the quiet hamlet where in a few months he had found what he had vainly sought for in many long and weary years, and plodded steadily across the moor to the highroad.

Here he sat down on the bank to wait till some conveyance going to Minehead should pass by--for he knew he had not sufficient strength to walk far.

"Tramping it" now was for him impossible,--moreover, his former thirst for adventure was satisfied; he had succeeded in his search for "a friend" without going so far as Cornwall.

There was no longer any cause for him to endure unnecessary fatigue--so he waited patiently, listening to the first wild morning carol of a skylark, which, bounding up from its nest hard by, darted into the air with quivering wings beating against the dispersing vapours of the dawn, and sang aloud in the full rapture of a joy made perfect by innocence.