silence,--for they are slow of speech, these men of the fells and
meres,--and was nursing his resentment till a day should bring that
chance which always comes. And when at the Sylvester Arms, on
one of those rare occasions when M'Adam was not present,
Tammas summed up the little man in that historic phrase of his,
"When he's drunk he's wi'lent, and when he bain't he's wicious,"
there was an applause to gratify the blas‚ heart of even Tammas
Thornton.

Yet it had not been till his wife's death that the little man had
allowed loose rein to his ill-nature. With her firmly gentle hand no
longer on the tiller of his life, it burst into. fresh being. And alone
in the world with David, the whole venom of his vicious
temperament was ever directed against the boy's head. It was as
though he saw in his fair-haired son the unconscious cause of his
ever-living sorrow. All the more strange this, seeing that, during
her life, the boy had been to poor Flora M'Adam as her heart's
core. And the lad was growing up the very antithesis of his father.
Big and hearty, with never an ache or ill in the whole of his sturdy
young body; of frank, open countenance; while even his speech
was slow and burring like any Dale-bred boy's. And the fact of it
all, and that the lad was palpably more Englishman than Scot--ay,
and gloried in it--exasperated the little man, a patriot before
everything, to blows. While, on top of it, David evinced an
amazing pertness fit to have tried a better man than Adam
M'Adam.

On the death of his wife, kindly Elizabeth Moore had, more than
once, offered such help to the lonely little man as a woman only
can give in a house that knows no mistress. On the last of these