cowardly midnight, where he might tremble, but dare not refuse.

"Lord!" cried simple Ripton, while these hopeful plots were raging in his
comrade's brain, now sparkling for immediate execution, and anon lapsing
disdainfully dark in their chances of fulfilment, "how I wish you'd have
let me notch him, Ricky! I'm a safe shot. I never miss. I should feel
quite jolly if I'd spanked him once. We should have had the beat of him
at that game. I say!" and a sharp thought drew Ripton's ideas nearer
home, "I wonder whether my nose is as bad as he says! Where can I see
myself?"

To these exclamations Richard was deaf, and he trudged steadily forward,
facing but one object.

After tearing through innumerable hedges, leaping fences, jumping dykes,
penetrating brambly copses, and getting dirty, ragged, and tired, Ripton
awoke from his dream of Farmer Blaize and a blue nose to the vivid
consciousness of hunger; and this grew with the rapidity of light upon
him, till in the course of another minute he was enduring the extremes of
famine, and ventured to question his leader whither he was being
conducted. Raynham was out of sight. They were a long way down the
valley, miles from Lobourne, in a country of sour pools, yellow brooks,
rank pasturage, desolate heath. Solitary cows were seen; the smoke of a
mud cottage; a cart piled with peat; a donkey grazing at leisure,
oblivious of an unkind world; geese by a horse-pond, gabbling as in the
first loneliness of creation; uncooked things that a famishing boy cannot
possibly care for, and must despise. Ripton was in despair.

"Where are you going to?" he inquired with a voice of the last time of
asking, and halted resolutely.