to his old comrade.

As to Steenie, the elder of David's children, he was yet unborn when
his father, partly in consequence of a wound from which he never quite
recovered, met with rather a serious accident through a young horse in
the harvest-field, and the report reached his wife that he was killed.
To the shock she thus received was generally attributed the peculiarity
of the child, prematurely born within a month after. He had long passed
the age at which children usually begin to walk, before he would even
attempt to stand, but he had grown capable of a speed on all-fours that
was astonishing. When at last he did walk, it was for more than two
years with the air of one who had learned a trick; and throughout his
childhood and a great part of his boyhood, he continued to go on
all-fours rather than on his feet.




CHAPTER VI

MAN-STEENIE


The sleeping youth began at length to stir: it was more than an hour
before he quite woke up. Then all at once he started to his feet with
his eyes wide open, putting back from his forehead the long hair which
fell over them, and revealing a face not actually looking old, but
strongly suggesting age. His eyes were of a pale blue, with a hazy,
mixed, uncertain gleam in them, reminding one of the shifty shudder and
shake and start of the northern lights at some heavenly version of the