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surprise, the mention of hia wife’s name, he entered amid the rest upon tha scene, Car’line was now in convulsions, weeping violently, and for a long time nothing could be done with her. While he was sending for a cart to take her onward to Stickleford, Hipcroft anxiously inquired how it had all happened ; and then the assembly explained that a fiddler formerly known in the locality had lately revisited his old haunts, and had taken upon himself without invitation to play that evening at the inn.

Ned demanded the fiddler’s name, and they said Ollamoor.

“ Ah! exclaimed Ned, looking round him. “Where is he, and where—where’s my little girl ?”

Ollamoor had disappeared, and so had the child. Hipcroft was in ordinary a quiet and tractable fellow, but a determination which was to be feared settled in his face now, “Blast him!’ he cried. “I'll beat his skull in for’n, if I swing for it to-morrow !”

He had rushed to the poker which lay on the hearth, and hastened down the passage, the people following. Outside the house, on the other side of the highway, a mass of dark heath-land rose sullenly upward to its not easily accessible interior, a ravined plateau, where-on jutted into the sky, at the diatance of a couple of miles, the-fir-woods of Mistover backed by the Yalbury coppices—a place of Dantesque gloom at thia hour, which would have afforded secure hiding for a battery of artillery, much less a man and a child.

Some other men plunged thitherward with him, and more went along the road. They were gone about twenty minutes altogether, returning without result to the inn, Ned sat down in the settle, and clasped his forehead with his bande,

“ Well-—what a fool the man is, and hev been all these years, if he thinks the child his, as a’ do seem