CHAPTER II.
Dinner was over; my father and I took ours in the large parlour, where the stiff, high-backed chairs eyed one another in opposite rows across the wide oaken floor, shiny and hard as marble, and slippery as glass.
Except the table, the sideboard and the cuckoo clock, there was no other furniture.
I dared not bring the poor wandering lad into this, my father's especial domain; but as soon as he was away in the tan-yard I sent for John.
Jael brought him in; Jael, the only womankind we ever had about us, and who, save to me when I happened to be very ill, certainly gave no indication of her sex in its softness and tenderness.

There had evidently been wrath in the kitchen.
"Phineas, the lad ha' got his dinner, and you mustn't keep 'un long.

I bean't going to let you knock yourself up with looking after a beggar-boy." A beggar-boy! The idea seemed so ludicrous, that I could not help smiling at it as I regarded him.

He had washed his face and combed out his fair curls; though his clothes were threadbare, all but ragged, they were not unclean; and there was a rosy, healthy freshness in his tanned skin, which showed he loved and delighted in what poor folk generally abominate--water.

And now the sickness of hunger had gone from his face, the lad, if not actually what our scriptural Saxon terms "well-favoured," was certainly "well-liking." A beggar-boy, indeed! I hoped he had not heard Jael's remark.