his head that workmen use for their tools, and he is barefooted. In one
picture he grins broadly and holds a bitten melon in his hand.

The winter pictures are less numerous and satisfactory. He wears huge
sabots--no doubt of beechwoods and (as fragments of the inscription
"John Stickells, Iping," show) sacks for socks, and his trousers and
jacket are unmistakably cut from the remains of a gaily patterned
carpet. Underneath that there were rude swathings of flannel; five or
six yards of flannel are tied comforter-fashion about his neck. The
thing on his head is probably another sack. He stares, sometimes
smiling, sometimes a little ruefully, at the camera. Even when he was
only five years old, one sees that half whimsical wrinkling over his
soft brown eyes that characterised his face.

He was from the first, the Vicar always declared, a terrible nuisance
about the village. He seems to have had a proportionate impulse to play,
much curiosity and sociability, and in addition there was a certain
craving within him--I grieve to say--for more to eat. In spite of what
Mrs. Greenfield called an "_excessively_ generous" allowance of food
from Lady Wondershoot, he displayed what the doctor perceived at once
was the "Criminal Appetite." It carries out only too completely Lady
Wondershoot's worst experiences of the lower classes--that in spite of
an allowance of nourishment inordinately beyond what is known to be the
maximum necessity even of an adult human being, the creature was found
to steal. And what he stole he ate with an inelegant voracity. His great
hand would come over garden walls; he would covet the very bread in the
bakers' carts. Cheeses went from Marlow's store loft, and never a pig
trough was safe from him. Some farmer walking over his field of swedes
would find the great spoor of his feet and the evidence of his nibbling
hunger--a root picked here, a root picked there, and the holes, with