It is Never Too Late to Mend. Charles Reade Reade

you, sir,” added he; “and by the titles you give me it seems you are not acquainted with me.”

      The police laughed, and took out of this injured man's pocket the stolen notes which Meadows instantly identified.

      Then Mr. Robinson started off into another key equally artistical in its way.

      “Miss Merton,” snuffled he, “appearances are against me, but mark my words, my innocence will emerge all the brighter for this temporary cloud.”

      Susan Merton ran indoors, saying, “Oh! I must tell George.” She was not sorry of an excuse to be by George's side, and remind him by her presence that if home had its thorns it had its rose tree, too.

      News soon spreads; rustic heads were seen peeping over the wall to see the finale of the fine gentleman from “Lunnun.” Meantime the constable went to put his horse in a four-wheeled chaise destined to convey Robinson to the county jail.

      If the rural population expected to see this worthy discomposed by so sudden a change of fortune, they were soon undeceived.

      “Well, Jacobs,” said he, with sudden familiarity, “you seem uncommon pleased, and I am content. I would rather have gone to California; but any place is better than England. Laugh those who win. I shall breathe a delicious climate; you will make yourself as happy as a prince, that is to say, miserable, upon fifteen shillings and two colds a week; my sobriety and industry will realize a fortune under a smiling sun. Let chaps that never saw the world, and the beautiful countries there are in it, snivel at leaving this island of fogs and rocks and taxes and nobs, the rich man's paradise, the poor man's—I never swear, it's vulgar.”

      While he was crushing his captors with his eloquence, George and Susan came together from the house; George's face betrayed wonder and something akin to horror.

      “A thief!” cried he. “Have I taken the hand of a thief?”

      “It is a business like any other,” said Robinson deprecatingly.

      “If you have no shame I have; I long to be gone now.”

      “George!” whined the culprit, who, strange to say, had become attached to the honest young farmer. “Did ever I take tithe of you? You have got a silver candle cup, a heavenly old coffee-pot, no end of spoons double the weight those rogues the silversmiths make them now; they are in a box under your bed in your room,” added he, looking down. “Count them, they are all right; and Miss Merton, your bracelet, the gold one with the cameo: I could have had it a hundred times. Miss Merton, ask him to shake hands with me at parting. I am so fond of him, and perhaps I shall never see him again.

      “Shake hands with you?” answered George sternly; “if your hands were loose I doubt I should ram my fist down your throat; but there, you are not worth a thought at such a time, and you are a man in trouble, and I am another. I forgive you, and I pray Heaven I may never see your face again.”

      And Honesty turned his back in Theft's face.

      Robinson bit his lip and said nothing, but his eyes glistened; just then a little boy and girl, who had been peering about mighty curious, took courage and approached hand in hand. The girl was the speaker, as a matter of course.

      “Farmer Fielding,” said she curtsying, a mode of reverence which was instantly copied by the boy, “we are come to see the thief; they say you have caught one. Oh, dear!” (and her bright little countenance was overcast), “I couldn't have told it from a man!”

      We don't know all that is in the hearts of the wicked. Robinson was observed to change color at these silly words.

      “Mr. Jacobs,” said he, addressing the policeman, “have you authority to put me in the pillory before trial?” He said this coldly and sternly; and then added, “Perhaps you are aware that I am a man, and I might say a brother, for you were a thief, you know!” Then changing his tone entirely, “I say, Jacobs,” said he, with cheerful briskness, “do you remember cracking the silversmith's shop in Lambeth along with Jem Salisbury and Black George, and—”

      “There, the gig is ready,” cried Mr. Jacobs; “you come along,” and the ex-thief pushed the thief hastily off the premises and drove him away with speed.

      George Fielding gave a bitter sigh. This was a fresh mortification. He had for the last two months been defending Robinson against the surmises of the village.

      Villages are always concluding there is something wrong about people.

      “What does he do?” inquired our village.

      “Where does he get his blue coat with brass buttons, his tartan waistcoat and green satin tie with red ends? We admit all this looks like a gentleman. But yet, somehow, a gentleman is a horse of another color than this Robinson.”

      George had sometimes laughed at all this, sometimes been very angry, and always stood up stoutly for his friend and lodger.

      And now the fools were right and he was wrong. His friend and protege was handcuffed before his eyes and carried off to the county jail amid the grins and stares of a score of gaping rustics, who would make a fine story of it this evening in both public-houses; and a hundred voices would echo some such conversational Tristich as this:

      1st Rustic. “I tawld un as much, dinn't I now, Jarge?”

      2d Rustic. “That ye did, Richard, for I heerd ee.”

      1st Rustic. “But, la! bless ye, he don't vally advice, he don't.”

      George Fielding groaned out, “I'm ready to go now—I'm quite ready to go—I am leaving a nest of insults;” and he darted into the house, as much to escape the people's eyes as to finish his slight preparations for so great a journey.

      Two men were left alone; sulky William and respectable Meadows. Both these men's eyes followed George into the house, and each had a strong emotion they were bent on concealing, and did conceal from each other; but was it concealed from all the world?

      The farm-house had two rooms looking upon the spot where most of our tale has passed.

      The smaller one of these was a little state parlor, seldom used by the family. Here on a table was a grand old folio Bible; the names, births, and deaths of a century of Fieldings appeared in rusty ink and various handwritings upon its fly-leaf.

      Framed on the walls were the first savage attempts of woman at worsted-work in these islands. There were two moral commonplaces, and there was the forbidden fruit-tree, whose branches diverged, at set distances like the radii of a circle, from its stem, a perpendicular line; exactly at the end of each branch hung one forbidden fruit—pre-Raphaelite worsted-work.

      There were also two prints of more modern date, one agricultural, one manufactural.

      No. 1 was a great show of farming implements at Doncaster.

      No. 2 showed how, one day in the history of man and of mutton, a sheep was sheared, her wool washed, teased, carded, etc., and the cloth *'d and *'d and *'d and *'d, and a coat shaped and sewed and buttoned upon a goose, whose preparations for inebriating the performers and spectators of his feat appeared in a prominent part of the picture.

      The window of this sunny little room was open and on the sill was a row of flower-pots from which a sweet fresh smell crept with the passing air into the chamber.

      Behind these flower-pots for two hours past had crouched—all eye and ear and mind—a keen old man.

      To Isaac Levi age had brought vast experience, and had not yet dimmed any one of his senses. More than forty-five years ago he had been brought to see that men seldom act or speak so as to influence the fortunes of others without some motive of their own; and that these motives are seldom the motives they advance; and that their real motives are not always known to themselves, and yet can nearly always be read and weighed by an intelligent bystander.

      So for near half a century Isaac Levi had read that marvelous page of nature written on black, white and red parchments, and called “Man.”

      One result of his