HORNING TO THE SOURCE OF THE BURE 183 



own reverie of the bright, bonny little English maiden whom 

 we so recently held in converse, and whom we individually 

 and collectively so much admire and respect. 



There cannot have been much variety in our dreams, but 

 let those mind-pictures which soothed our friend (who had 

 known her years ago) be followed in preference to others. 



With half-closed eyes and senses but hovering on the 

 borderland of unconsciousness he wandered back to boyhood 

 with the lithe figure of Molly ever present in the pictures of 

 his fancy reflections of fact rather than of fiction. 



He sees himself, at the early age of ten or a dozen years, 

 crouching in an osier-bed beside the hundred-drain, bending a 

 yielding willow wand of overgrown proportions down in a 

 bow over the well-beaten path of a hare, he is setting the 

 deadly noose with a practised hand, and twining grasses 

 round the suspicious-looking portions of the poaching 

 apparatus, when he receives a sudden fright. He is conscious 

 that he is not alone. With the perspiration starting from his 

 forehead he gazes round with frightened stare, and sees 

 peering from the parted reeds of a grown - up dyke the 

 laughing eyes, the sunburnt face, the cherry lips, and the 

 curly locks of little Molly. " Now spring that snare, Master 



, or I'll tell " (naming a keeper, whom he held in 



wholesome dread). " No, you won't get over me this time 

 by wheedling; spring that snare and kick up the stakes." 

 "But, Molly," he expostulates. It is no use, Molly comes 

 from her lair and springs the snare herself. "It's all very 

 well for you, you know," she says ; " if you would only say 

 you snared them, but you know you don't, and when the 

 snares are found other people may be blamed, and it's not 

 right." Whether he encircled that lithe waist and dried the 

 teardrops on that tempting cheek, in order to console the 

 woe of Molly ou learning that there were other snares in 

 the osier-bed, the whereabouts of which he refused to disclose, 

 and the proposed destruction of which he would not listen 

 to, cannot be recorded, as the picture of wandering con- 

 templation changes suddenly. 



