Tales from Many Sources | Page 5

is a favorite color with Indian squaws. To the last
dirty rag it is effective, whether it flutters near a tent on Bagshot Heath,
or in some wigwam doorway makes a point of brightness against the
grey shadows of the pine forest.
A large kerchief of this, wound about its body, was the baby's only robe,
but he seemed quite comfortable in it when Miss Betty found him,
sleeping on a pillow of deep hair moss, his little brown fists closed as
fast as his eyes, and a crimson toadstool grasped in one of them.
When Miss Betty screamed the baby awoke, and his long black lashes
tickled his cheeks and made him wink and cry. But by the time she
returned with her sister and the parson, he was quite happy again,
gazing up with dark eyes full of delight into the glowing broom-brush,

and fighting the evening breeze with his feet, which were entangled in
the folds of the yellow cloth, and with the battered toadstool which was
still in his hand.
"And, indeed, sir," said Miss Betty, who had rubbed her nose till it
looked like the twin toadstool to that which the baby was flourishing in
her face, "you won't suppose I would have left the poor little thing
another moment, to catch its death of cold on a warm evening like this;
but having no experience of such cases, and remembering that murder
at the inn in the Black Valley, and that the body was not allowed to be
moved till the constables had seen it, I didn't feel to know how it might
be with foundlings, and--"
But still Miss Betty did not touch the bairn. She was not accustomed to
children. But the parson had christened too many babies to be afraid of
them, and he picked up the little fellow in a moment, and tucked the
yellow rag round him, and then addressing the little ladies precisely as
if they were sponsors, he asked in his deep round voice, "Now where
on the face of the earth are the vagabonds who have deserted this
child?"
The little ladies did not know, the broom bushes were silent, and the
question has remained unanswered from that day to this.
There were no railways near Lingborough at this time. The coach ran
three times a week, and a walking postman brought the letters from the
town to the small hamlets. Telegraph wires were unknown, and yet
news travelled quite as fast then as it does now, and in the course of the
following morning all the neighbourhood knew that Miss Betty had
found a baby under a broom bush, and the lawyer called in the
afternoon to inquire how the ladies found themselves after the tea party
at Mrs. General Dunmaw's.
Miss Kitty was glad on the whole. She felt nervous, but ready for a
renewal of hostilities. Several clinching arguments had occurred to her
in bed last night, and after hastily looking up a few lines from her
common-place book, which always made her cry when she read them,
but which she hoped to be able to hurl at the lawyer with a steady voice,

she followed Miss Betty to the drawing-room.
It was half a relief and half a disappointment to find that the lawyer was
quite indifferent to the subject of their late contest. He overflowed with
compliments; was quite sure he must have had the worst of the
argument, and positively dying of curiosity to hear about the baby.
The little ladies were very full of the subject themselves. An active
search for the baby's relations, conducted by the parson, the clerk, the
farm-bailiff, the constable, the cowherd, and several supernumeraries,
had so far proved quite vain. The country folk were most anxious to
assist, especially by word of mouth. Except a small but sturdy number
who had seen nothing, they had all seen "tramps," but unluckily no two
could be got together whose accounts of the tramps themselves, of the
hour at which they were seen, or of the direction in which they went,
would tally with each other.
The little ladies were quite alive to the possibility that the child's
parents might never be traced, indeed the matter had been constantly
before their minds ever since the parson had carried the baby to
Lingborough, and laid it in the arms of Thomasina, the servant.
Miss Betty had sat long before her toilette-table that evening, gazing
vacantly at the looking-glass. Not that the reflection of the eight
curl-papers she had neatly twisted up was conveyed to her brain. She
was in a brown study, during which the following thoughts passed
through her mind, and they all pointed one way:
That that fine little fellow was not to blame for his people's misconduct.