“Yes, my boy, yes, all but this, which I’ll carry into the house; and just lock the outer door, now you’re near it,” said Bartle, getting his stick in the fitting angle to help him in descending from his stool.  He was no sooner on the ground than it became obvious why the stick was necessary—­the left leg was much shorter than the right.  But the school-master was so active with his lameness that it was hardly thought of as a misfortune; and if you had seen him make his way along the schoolroom floor, and up the step into his kitchen, you would perhaps have understood why the naughty boys sometimes felt that his pace might be indefinitely quickened and that he and his stick might overtake them even in their swiftest run.

The moment he appeared at the kitchen door with the candle in his hand, a faint whimpering began in the chimney-corner, and a brown-and-tan-coloured bitch, of that wise-looking breed with short legs and long body, known to an unmechanical generation as turnspits, came creeping along the floor, wagging her tail, and hesitating at every other step, as if her affections were painfully divided between the hamper in the chimney-corner and the master, whom she could not leave without a greeting.

“Well, Vixen, well then, how are the babbies?” said the schoolmaster, making haste towards the chimney-corner and holding the candle over the low hamper, where two extremely blind puppies lifted up their heads towards the light from a nest of flannel and wool.  Vixen could not even see her master look at them without painful excitement:  she got into the hamper and got out again the next moment, and behaved with true feminine folly, though looking all the while as wise as a dwarf with a large old-fashioned head and body on the most abbreviated legs.

“Why, you’ve got a family, I see, Mr. Massey?” said Adam, smiling, as he came into the kitchen.  “How’s that?  I thought it was against the law here.”

“Law?  What’s the use o’ law when a man’s once such a fool as to let a woman into his house?” said Bartle, turning away from the hamper with some bitterness.  He always called Vixen a woman, and seemed to have lost all consciousness that he was using a figure of speech.  “If I’d known Vixen was a woman, I’d never have held the boys from drowning her; but when I’d got her into my hand, I was forced to take to her.  And now you see what she’s brought me to—­the sly, hypocritical wench”—­Bartle spoke these last words in a rasping tone of reproach, and looked at Vixen, who poked down her head and turned up her eyes towards him with a keen sense of opprobrium—­“and contrived to be brought to bed on a Sunday at church-time.  I’ve wished again and again I’d been a bloody minded man, that I could have strangled the mother and the brats with one cord.”

“I’m glad it was no worse a cause kept you from church,” said Adam.  “I was afraid you must be ill for the first time i’ your life.  And I was particularly sorry not to have you at church yesterday.”