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