“An adventure!  Just as I was writing these last words, I heard the cry of a young person, as it sounded, for help.  I ran to the river and jumped in, and had the pleasure of saving a life.  I got some bruises which have laid me up for a day or two; but I am getting over them very well now, and you need not worry about me at all.  I will write again soon; so pray do not fret yourself, for I have had no hurt that will trouble me for any time.”

Of course, poor Susan Posey burst out crying, and cried as if her heart would break.  Oh dear!  Oh dear! what should she do!  He was almost killed, she knew he was, or he had broken some of his bones.  Oh dear!  Oh dear!  She would go and see him, there!—­she must and would.  He would die, she knew he would,—­and so on.

It was a singular testimony to the evident presence of a human element in Mr. Bytes Gridley that the poor girl, on her extreme trouble, should think of him as a counsellor.  But the wonderful relenting kind of look on his grave features as he watched the little twins tumbling about his great books, and certain marks of real sympathy he had sometimes shown for her in her lesser woes, encouraged her, and she went straight to his study, letter in hand.  She gave a timid knock at the door of that awful sanctuary.

“Come in, Susan Posey,” was its answer, in a pleasant tone.  The old master knew her light step and the maidenly touch of her small hand on the panel.

What a sight! ’there were Sossy and Minthy intrenched in a Sebastopol which must have cost a good half-hour’s engineering, and the terrible Bytes Gridley besieging the fortress with hostile manifestations of the most singular character.  He was actually discharging a large sugar-plum at the postern gate, which having been left unclosed, the missile would certainly have reached one of the garrison, when he paused as the door opened, and the great round spectacles and four wide, staring infants’ eyes were levelled at Miss Susan Posey.

She almost forgot her errand, grave as it was, in astonishment at this manifestation.  The old man had emptied his shelves of half their folios to build up the fort, in the midst of which he had seated the two delighted and uproarious babes.  There was his Cave’s “Historia Literaria,” and Sir Walter Raleigh’s “History of the World,” and a whole array of Christian Fathers, and Plato, and Aristotle, and Stanley’s book of Philosophers, with Effigies, and the Junta Galen, and the Hippocrates of Foesius, and Walton’s Polyglot, supported by Father Sanchez on one side and Fox’s “Acts and Monuments” on the other,—­an odd collection, as folios from lower shelves are apt to be.

The besieger discharged his sugar-plum, which was so well aimed that it fell directly into the lap of Minthy, who acted with it as if the garrison had been on short rations for some time.

He saw at once, on looking up, that there was trouble.  “What now, Susan Posey, my dear?”