But he was getting terribly tired now.  The burning sun on the fells had sucked him up; but the damp heat of the woody crag sucked him up still more; and the perspiration ran out of the ends of his fingers and toes, and washed him cleaner than he had been for a whole year.  But, of course, he dirtied everything terribly as he went.  There has been a great black smudge all down the crag ever since.  And there have been more black beetles in Vendale since than ever were known before; all, of course, owing to Tom’s having blacked the original papa of them all, just as he was setting off to be married, with a sky-blue coat and scarlet leggings, as smart as a gardener’s dog with a polyanthus in his mouth.

At last he got to the bottom.  But, behold, it was not the bottom—­as people usually find when they are coming down a mountain.  For at the foot of the crag were heaps and heaps of fallen limestone of every size from that of your head to that of a stage-waggon, with holes between them full of sweet heath fern; and before Tom got through them, he was out in the bright sunshine again; and then he felt, once for all and suddenly, as people generally do, that he was b-e-a-t, beat.  You must expect to be beat a few times in your life, little man, if you live such a life as a man ought to live, let you be as strong and healthy as you may; and when you are, you will find it a very ugly feeling.  I hope that that day you may have a stout, staunch friend by you who is not beat; for, if you have not, you had best lie where you are, and wait for better times, as poor Tom did.

He could not get on.  The sun was burning, and yet he felt chill all over.  He was quite empty, and yet he felt quite sick.  There was but two hundred yards of smooth pasture between him and the cottage, and yet he could not walk down it.  He could hear the stream murmuring only one field beyond it, and yet it seemed to him as if it was a hundred miles off.

He lay down on the grass till the beetles ran over him, and the flies settled on his nose.  I don’t know when he would have got up again, if the gnats and the midges had not taken compassion on him.  But the gnats blew their trumpets so loud in his ear, and the midges nibbled so at his hands and face wherever they could find a place free from soot, that at last he woke up, and stumbled away, down over a low wall, and into a narrow road, and up to the cottage door.

And a neat, pretty cottage it was, with clipped yew hedges all round the garden, and yews inside, too, cut into peacocks and trumpets and teapots and all kinds of queer shapes, And out of the open door came a noise like that of the frogs, when they know that it is going to be scorching hot to-morrow—­and how they know that I don’t know, and you don’t know, and nobody knows,

He came slowly up to the open door, which was all hung round with clematis and roses; and then peeped in, half afraid,