the cause of it is soon apparent; for from under the old rails comes a full-grown otter, not wet this time. Her coat shines in the sun. The cry sounds again. She bends her head down low for a moment. When she raises it she has a cub not quite half grown in her mouth. Holding it as a cat would a kitten, she places it on the grass, where it begins at once to skylark with its mother's tail. Once more the action is repeated with another cub. Then the mother and her young play in the sun like a cat with her kittens. It might be long before one came upon such a sight as that again.

Suddenly a shot is heard coming from some place of concealment near at hand. One cub falls over on his back, dead, with his feet drawn up as if still at play, shot through the heart. Mother otter knows that sound, she has beard it before, but to the little ones it is new; and the other one thinks the brother is only at his gambols, and plays about round him; the mother grips him by the nape of the neck, but it is in vain, for out from the cover runs a man. Only when he rushes at her and raises his gun to strike her with the butt end does she let go her hold and dash into the river. The poor little cubs had never seen a human being before, and the remaining one does not attempt to bite when his captor picks him up; he only cries most piteously for his mother. The whole proceeding is distasteful to me, but I must not say so, as I am only here on sufferance, the other by right.

'I'll have her! see if I don't, before many minutes are over.' Taking a piece of string from his pocket he ties it round the cub's neck, and tethers the poor little animal to a peg in the ground. "You come this way into the bushes.'

Left to himself, the cub gives free vent to his sorrow. Look! see that plough-up of the water, just under; she's heard him and is coming fast,' whispers the man.

With a rush, she shoots from the river to the meadow, and is at once shot. Her love for her cubs has cost her her life.

'They will make a good case for the House when they are set up, won't they?'

'Set up,' indeed! No doubt they will. Any talk of setting up and stuffing of wild creatures generally gets my dander up. It takes a man that is familiar with the animal in its native haunts, and an artist to boot, to make the poor dead things look natural and lifelike.

'How do you account for the number of otters about here?' I ask the man presently.

6

The

Why, this way. They have always been about the river, but not just in this part till late years. You see, before the old squire died there was a good lot of keepers and lookers-out, for he kept up a good head of game. So if an otter come down here, he had a hot time of it. Some of the gentry up the river that had ponds on their lawns, with gold-fish in them, knowed they was about, for though there was plenty for 'em in the river they would come out of it and get the gold-fish. The old squire's going off made a great difference; the family went abroad, or somewhere away, after his death, and things went on very quiet for years. establishment was mostly closed. The game was killed off and no more reared, and the keepers found fresh places. The principal hands on the estate just give an eye to things to see that no mischief was done. Well, the otters found out they could come here without being harried about, and back they come with a vengeance. You see, for one thing, there's cover for 'em. All the sides of the banks are undermined and matted with the tree roots, and the water is very deep. If they had otter hounds they would be of no use here, for fifteen or twenty feet of water in places, and a long stretch of it, to say nothing of the network of big roots, would break the hearts of the best pack in England. It's wonderful the distance they'll run at times their holes, I mean. Rabbits work the banks in all directions; then, when the otter finds a spot that suits him, he gives the rabbits notice to quit in his own fashion. It wants little altering to make his home ready

for him.'

'Ay, he's pretty cute.'

'You know that gravelly bank yonder? Well, one flood time we was hunting the rats that the water had drove out. It had drove the rabbits too, but it was rats we was hunting. We had got the ferrets and the dogs. The ferrets worked well, and went into all the holes as free as rain, till we come to a couple on the top of that particular bank. We turned 'em down, but they wouldn't work them. All they did was to just poke their noses in and sniff, and then run round the holes, uneasy like. The dogs, too, sniffed and scratched about strange like for them, quieter than they was used. We jumped about and poked into the holes, wondering why the ferrets would not go in. The river was rushing almost bank-high to where we stood; when all at once something was heard whining like, and somebody said, 'Look at that!' It was a sight! for in the river was a fine otter. She

had her cub by the nape of the neck, and was swimming across with him. It was hard work, but she tore through that rush of water from the weir in fine style. There was nothing above water but the alder stems on the other side, and she made for them. She was not twenty yards away from us the whole time. Well, when she reached them, she got her cub on to a limb and left him. He did cry. And then we lost sight of her for a bit. The whine come again, almost close to our feet, and the dogs stood with ears pricked up and one fore-foot lifted, just quivering with excitement. She dashes out from the bank with a second cub. The dogs rush to the water's edge, but they dare not plunge in, plucky as they are; for they knowed they'd be washed down and dashed into the limbs of the fallen trees that lay in and across the river. She got him over all right, and then they three made for the alder copse. That's how I come to know the distance they'll lay up in a bank.'

'Had you a gun with you?'

No; and if I had, it should never have gone to my shoulder to fire at her, when she'd been so plucky like. It 'd just have seemed like murder to me, for all I killed them two just now. But you see it's like this; the head uns walk round and see some of their leavings on the ground, and make a bit of a fuss about it; for some of 'em are fond of fishing. So just to keep matters quiet, you must know, I'm obliged to settle one or two when I have the chance. I don't want to brag about my shootin', but if I do get a fair sight at 'em they don't suffer much, for I always use a cartridge. As far as myself is concerned, I should never meddle with 'em ; but, you see, where there's more 'an one master to please, you must mind your P's and Q's, as they say.'

Just so, my friend; that is the philosophical way of looking at things.'

He smiles, and bids me good-day. We have had many a chat together, he and I, before this.

When the harvest-moon floods the river and trees with light, and his day's fishing is over, the otter plays about in the meadows bordering the river-side to his heart's content. Where the steep sides of the hill-called the Whites-shoot down to the river, he is at home. Gnarled roots and fallen trees find him a safe refuge. The hill-side is claimed by the fox and badger, but the river is the domain of the otter; he holds his own there, and is likely to do for many a day to come.

A LIFE'S MORNING.

BY THE AUTHOR OF DEMOS,' 'THYRZA,' ETC.

CHAPTER V.

THE SHADOW OF HOME.

THE house which was the end of Emily's journey was situated two miles outside the town of Dunfield, on the high road going southward, just before it enters upon a rising tract of common land known as the Heath. It was one of a row of two-storeyed dwellings, built of glazed brick, each with a wide projecting window on the right hand of the front door, and with a patch of garden railed in from the road, the row being part of a straggling colony which is called Banbrigg. Immediately opposite these houses stood an ecclesiastical edifice of depressing appearance, stone-built, wholly without ornament, presenting a corner to the highway, a chapel-of-ease for worshippers unable to go as far as Dunfield in the one direction or the village of Pendal in the other. Scattered about were dwelling-houses old and new; the former being cottages of the poorest and dirtiest kind, the latter brick structures of the most unsightly form, evidently aiming at constituting themselves into a thoroughfare, and, in point of fact, already rejoicing in the name of Regent Street. There was a publichouse, or rather, as it frankly styled itself in large letters on the window, a dram-shop; and there were two or three places for the sale of very miscellaneous articles, exhibiting the same specimens of discouraging stock throughout the year. At no season, and under no advantage of sky, was Banbrigg a delectable abode. Though within easy reach of country which was not without rural aspects, it was marked too unmistakably with the squalor of a manufacturing district. Its existence impressed one as casual; it was a mere bit of Dunfield got away from the main mass, and having brought its dirt with it. The stretch of road between it and the bridge by which the river was crossed into Dunfield had in its long, hard ugliness something dispiriting. Though hedges bordered it here and there, they were stunted and grimed; though

fields were seen on this side and on that, the grass had absorbed too much mill-smoke to exhibit wholesome verdure; it was fed upon by sheep and cows, seemingly turned in to be out of the way till needed for slaughter, and by the sorriest of superannuated horses. The land was blighted by the curse of what we name, using a word as ugly as the thing it represents, industrialism.

As the cab brought her along this road from Dunfield station, Emily thought of the downs, the woodlands, the fair pastures of Surrey. There was sorrow at her heart, even a vague tormenting fear. It would be hard to find solace in Banbrigg.

Hither her parents had come to live when she was thirteen years old, her home having previously been in another and a larger manufacturing town. Her father was a man marked for ill-fortune: it pursued him from his entrance into the world, and would inevitably-you read it in his face-hunt him into a sad grave. He was the youngest of a large family; his very birth had been an added misery to a household struggling with want. His education was of the slightest; at twelve years of age he was already supporting himself, or, one would say, keeping himself above the point of starvation; and at three-and-twenty--the age when Wilfrid Athel is entering upon life in the joy of freedomwas ludicrously bankrupt, a petty business he had established being sold up for a debt something short of as many pounds as he had years. He drifted into indefinite mercantile clerkships, an existence possibly preferable to that of the fourth circle of Inferno, and then seemed at length to have fallen upon a piece of good luck, such as, according to a maxim of pathetic optimism wherewith he was wont to cheer himself, must come to every man sooner or later-provided he do not die of hunger whilst it is on the way. He married a schoolmistress, one Miss Martin, who was responsible for the teaching of some twelve or fifteen children of tender age, and who, what was more, owned the house in which she kept school. The result was that James Hood once more established himself in business, or rather in several businesses, vague, indescribable, save by those who are unhappy enough to understand such matters-a commission agency, a life-insurance agency and a fire-insurance ditto, I know not what. Yet the semblance of prosperity was fleeting. As if connection with him meant failure, his wife's school, which she had not abandoned (let us employ negative terms in speaking of this pair), began to fall off; ultimately no school was left. It did in truth appear that