which, too, there came lumbering up, by times, like any half floating and half sinking rubbish in the river, the question, Was it done by accident? The setting of a trap for finding out whether it was accidentally done, soon superseded, as a practical piece of cunning, the abstruser inquiry why otherwise it was done. And he devised a means.

Rogue Riderhood went into his Lock-house, and brought forth, into the now sober grey light, his chest of clothes. Sitting on the grass beside it, he turned out, one by one, the articles it contained, until he came to a conspicuous bright red neckerchief stained black here and there by wear. It arrested his attention, and he sat pausing over it, until he took off the rusty colourless wisp that he wore round his throat, and substituted the red neckerchief, leaving the long ends flowing. “Now,” said the Rogue, “if arter he sees me in this neckhankecher, I see him in a sim’lar neckhankecher, it won’t be accident!” Elated by his device, he carried his chest in again and went to supper.

“Lock ho! Lock!” It was a light night, and a barge coming down summoned him out of a long doze. In due course he had let the barge through and was alone again, looking to the closing of his gates, when Bradley Headstone appeared before him, standing on the brink of the Lock.

“Halloa!” said Riderhood. “Back a’ ready, T’otherest?”

“He has put up for the night, at an Angler’s Inn,” was the fatigued and hoarse reply. “He goes on, up the river, at six in the morning. I have come back for a couple of hours’ rest.”

“You want ’em,” said Riderhood, making towards the schoolmaster by his plank bridge.

“I don’t want them,” returned Bradley, irritably, “because I would rather not have them, but would much prefer to follow him all night. However, if he won’t lead, I can’t follow. I have been waiting about, until I could discover, for a certainty, at what time he starts; if I couldn’t have made sure of it, I should have stayed there. — This would be a bad pit for a man to be flung into with his hands tied. These slippery smooth walls would give him no chance. And I suppose those gates would suck him down?”

“Suck him down, or swaller him up, he wouldn’t get out,” said Riderhood. “Not even, if his hands warn’t tied, he wouldn’t. Shut him in at both ends, and I’d give him a pint o’ old ale ever to come up to me standing here.”

Bradley looked down with a ghastly relish. “You run about the brink, and run across it, in this uncertain light, on a few inches width of rotten wood,” said he. “I wonder you have no thought of being drowned.”

“I can’t be!” said Riderhood.

“You can’t be drowned?”

“No!” said Riderhood, shaking his head with an air of thorough conviction, “it’s well known. I’ve been brought out o’ drowning, and I can’t be drowned. I wouldn’t have that there busted B’lowbridger aware on it, or her people might make it tell agin’ the damages I mean to get. But it’s well known to water-side characters like myself, that him as has been brought out o’ drowning, can never be drowned.”

Bradley smiled sourly at the ignorance he would have corrected in one of his pupils, and continued to look down into the water, as if the place had a gloomy fascination for him.

“You seem to like it,” said Riderhood.

He took no notice, but stood looking down, as if he had not heard the words. There was a very dark expression on his face; an expression that the Rogue found it hard to understand. It was fierce, and full of purpose; but the purpose might have been as much against himself as against another. If he had stepped back for a spring, taken a leap, and thrown himself in, it would have been no surprising sequel