folk's sons may toil and moil without notice. But when it was proved
that the tramp-boy had stolen nothing, when all search for him was vain,
and when prosperity faded from the place season by season and year by
year, there were old folk who whispered that the gaudily-clothed child
Miss Betty had found under the broom-bush had something more than common
in him, and that whoever and whatever had offended the eerie creature,
he had taken the luck of Lingborough with him when he went away.

It was early summer. The broom was shining in the hedges with uncommon
wealth of golden blossoms. "The lanes looked for all the world as they
did the year that poor child was found," said Thomasina, wiping her
eyes. Annie the lass sobbed hysterically, and the cowherd found himself
so low in spirits that after gazing dismally at the cowstalls, which had
not been cleaned for days past, he betook himself to the ale-house to
refresh his energies for this and other arrears of work.

On returning to the farm, however, he found his hands still feeble, and
he took a drop or two more to steady them, after which it occurred to
him that certain new potatoes which he had had orders to dig were yet in
the ground. The wood was not chopped for the next day's use, and he
wondered what had become of a fork he had had in the morning and had
laid down somewhere.

So he seated himself on some straw in the corner to think about it all,
and whilst he was thinking he fell fast asleep.

By his own account many remarkable things had befallen him in the course
of his life, including that meeting with a Black Something to which
allusion has been made, but nothing so strange as what happened to him
that night.