LITERATURE.

Patea Mail, Volume IX, Issue 1114, 19 November 1883, Page 4

LITERATURE.

MARKED FOR THE KNIFE

About two years before the startling revelations respecting the dissecting trade in Edinburgh had placed the legal supply of “ subjects” upon its present satisfactory footing, there occurred to my elder brother, at that time a delicate boy of fourteen, a single adventure, involving such a shock to his nerves as the doctors believed very much hastened his death, which occurred in less than a year after it. We then resided in a large white house, with a row of poplars in front, close to one of our canals. Within a stone’s throw of our hall door was a lock and a lock house, and then followed, in the London direction, one of the longest and most solitary levels in the United Kingdom. The canal, at a point seventy yards from the lock, makes a slight defection. The consequence is that neither the lock nor our house is visible from the long, straight level that follows, and which is closely fenced between tall hedges and old trees.

My brother had been ordered walking exercise, and my father generally appointed the path beside the level I had described for his walk. The traffic, never very active, was, at that time, in a stale little better than exiinct. Not more than two or three boats passed in n day, and chiefly owing to its perfect qnielnde it had been chosen for the walk of our solitary invalid. It was now summer, and the hour of his daily walk was from fire to seven ; the earlier hours of the afternoon being pronounced too hot for the exercise.

On the evening in question he set out alone. His usual walk was to a point two miles up the level, where there was a stone block, on which he used to sit and rest a little before setting out for homoi

While he was taking his ease on this stone bench and listlessly looking up and down the long and deserted reach of water, there emerged, a few hundred yards to his left, from a sequestered path, a singular figure, which approached slowly and passed him by, with only the narrow towpaih between them. It was moving in the direction of our house, and was that of an emaciated man with a complexion dark as very old boxwood, limping, os it seemed, painfully, very much stooped, and with a big angular lump upon his back. His hair was long and sooty black, he had prominent dark eyes under thick black brows, and his face and chin were stabbed with a week’s growth of beard. He was leaning heavily on a long stick, and walked with a kind of hitch, which resembled a spasm, and gave one the idea that each step was accompanied by a separate sting of pain. The face of this man expressed extreme weakness and suffering, and might almost be that of a man dragging himself away, with a mortal wound, to some spot where he might lie down and die in quiet. He had a long and heavy green coat, which had grown to be, indeed, n coat of many colours, for over the thread-bare and greasy ground it was overlaid, with fantastic and extraordinary industry, with a tesselation of patches of every imaginable colour, in which yellow and red and blue and black were discernible under a varnish of grease, and toned with a variety of dirt; and even these patches were patched again, and had broken here and there into rents and fissures and bunches of shreds and tatters. Hound his body was buckled a broad discoloured leathern strap and he wore a wide-leafed felt hat, with a rather conical crown, brown and grimed by time and ill-treatment. 'The figure, with long gaiters of rabbit skin and shapeless ‘ brogue,’ limped past my brother without taking the slightest notice of him, and, uttering now and then a short groan, as if ot suppresced pain, he excited the wonder and in some degree the compassion of the boy. Ho watched the progress of the man, who was moving with great difficulty and with many halts in the direction of our home. It wss not until he had got on nearly a quarter of a mile that niy brother got tip/ now quite rested, to follow in the same direction. As the strange, crooked man with the stick got on ho appeared to grow more and more exhausted/ and at length he tottered into a little recess at the edge of the path, and fell hopelessly on his side' among the bushes.

Tha boy quickened bis pace as ho approached the spot. He passed the bead of a narrow lane, in which he saw a donkey and cart standing. The cart bad in it, upon some straw, a piece of old carpet, from under which emerged some folds of coarse canvas, like a part of an old sack, hut be could not see any one in charge of this conveyance, though, being anxious to obtain help, ho called repeatedly. Despairing ofsuccourhcwent on and reached the point where he had seen the man fall. Here he found him. He had crept a little further in among the bushes. He was supporting himself feebly on the ground upon his elbow, his eyes turned up as if he were on the point of swooning, and he moaned faintly. The boy’s courage almost failed him j but the sick man seemed to perceive him, turned his eyes upon him imploringly, and extended his hand toward him, so evidently signalled for aid, that my brother could not help drawing near. The fainting man then told him, in a whisper, that if he would take his hand and draw him gently toward him he would, perhaps, be able to turn himself a little to his greater relief. My brother did give him his hand accordingly, and the fainting man, instead of taking it, seized his arm above the elbow with a gigantic hand in a grip like a vice, and jerking him under, sprang over him, thrusting his other arm round and beneath him, so as to pinion him fast. ( To he continued.)