BARNABY RUDGE.
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icsponsibility, and you see what I have done with it. Take this for your trouble."
Huofh stepped forward to receive the piece of money he held out to him. As he put it in his hand, he added :
"If you should happen to find any thinor else of this sort, or to pick up any kind of information you may think I would like to have, bring it here will you, my good fel- low ]"
This was said with a smile which im- plied — or Hugh thought it did — "fail to do so at your peril I" He answered that he would.
"And don't," said his patron, with an air of the very kindest patronage, " don't be at all downcast or uneasy respecting that little rashness we have been speaking of. Your neck is as safe in my hands, my g'ood fellow, as though a baby's fingers clasped it, I assure you. — Take another g^lass. You are quieter now."
Hugh accepted it from his hand, and looking stealthily at his smiling face, drank the contents in silence.
" Don't you — ha, ha ! — don't you drink to the drink any more!" said xMr. Chester, in his most winning manner.
"To you, sir," was the sullen answer, with something approaching to a bow. " I drink to you."
"Thank you. God bless you, By-the- bye, what is your name, my good soul 1 You are called Hugh, I know, of course — your other name ?"
" I have no other name ?"
" A very strange fellow ! Do you mean that you never knew one, or that you don't choose to toll it? Which !"
" I 'd tell it if I could," said Hugh, quick- ly. " 1 can't. 1 have been always called Hugh; notliing more. I never knew, nor saw, nor thought about a father ; and I was a boy of six — that's not very old — when they hung my mother up at Tyburn for a couple of thousand men to stare at. They might have let her live. She was poor enough."
" How very sad !" exclaimed his patron, with a condescending smile. " I have no doubt she was an exceedingly fine woman."
" You see that dog of minel" said Hugh abruptly.
" Faithful, I dare say V rejoined his patron, looking at him through his glass; " and immensely clever ! Virtuous and gifted animals, whether man or beast, al- ways are so very hideous."
" Such a dog as that, and one of the same breed, was the only living thing ex- cept me that howled that day," said Hugh. " Out of the two thousand odd — there was a larger crowd for its being a woman — the dog and I alone had any pity. If he 'd have been a man, he 'd have been glad to be quit of her, for she had been forced to keep him lean and half-starved ; but being a dog, and not having a man's sense, he was sorry."
" It was dull of the brute, certainly," said Mr, Chester, "and very like a brute."
Hugh made no rejoinder; but, whistling to his dog, who sprung up at the sound and
