NED'S MOTTO.

CHAPTER I.

THE BUTCHER'S SHOP.

HROUGH the town of Harland ran a small river. It was a little, insignificant stream in itself, but, like many other small things, brought important matters in its course. In some mysterious way, this river divided the town more effectually than if it had been a high wall bristling with cannon. There were western parties and eastern parties, western clubs and eastern clubs, western schools and eastern schools, western great men and eastern great men. Whatever the west did the east set itself against, and whatever the east did the west pronounced remarkably foolish.

Notwithstanding this state of feeling, the town built and kept in good repair a very fine bridge between the two disaffected districts; and whatever was built near the bridge seemed to escape the general dislike. Therefore all the shops and everything of a business kind clustered around

this spot. Some man, more cunning than others, drove piles into the water, and built on them an odd-looking shop, which he claimed as belonging neither to the west nor to the east, but to both. Here he drove a thriving trade, so long as he was allowed to trade at all, and when he died he was succeeded by a number of tenants; all keeping shops renowned for the variety and somewhat doubtful character of their wares. At the time at which our story commences, the place was appropriated by a butcher, who added to its other decorations a new sign, with a quarter of mutton, a rib-piece of pork, two sirloins, a dead fowl, and a rabbit, all painted in such colours as only a country artist can produce, and looking as much like their originals as if they had been copied from an orang-outang, or one of those unsightly birds which we hear 'walked the earth' so many thousand years ago. Still the shop and the sign were the admiration of every wonder-seeker, from the ten-year-old boys upwards, and there was no end to the questions and conjectures which it excited. How were those piles ever placed on firm ground in such a dashing river? how did they withstand the spring floods? If they should suddenly give way, what would become of Mr. Jenkins and all his stock? There were many timid boys who, when sent to do an errand at the shop, did not venture in, but stood at the door, almost expecting to see it vanish from their sight before old Mr. Jenkins could weigh out and wrap up their meat. Still there it stood, week after week, and year after year, resisting winter ice and spring flood; and at the time the war broke out no shop in the country did so large a business, and no firm was more highly

respected and trusted than that of 'Jenkins and Sons.' But the war took the two boys; and so, in addition to its other attractions, the shop became a sort of meeting-place for all those who had friends in the army-a news-room to which every scrap of war information was sure to be brought before it was taken anywhere else. One can hardly imagine the inside of a butcher's shop to be a very desirable place in which to sit and chat, but those who think so can never have been at Mr. Jenkins's. It was a low, long, narrow room, reminding you, either from its shape or from the sound of the water beating constantly against its foundations, of the state-room of a steamboat, and never was state-room kept more strictly clean. The very block and cleaver, which were used every hour of the day to cut the meat, were spotless; and for the floor, it was currently reported in Harland that good Mrs. Jenkins bleached the sand at home before her husband used it upon it. The walls of the room, neatly whitewashed, were garlanded with pieces of meat of every shape and quality, but all hung so as to display the best side to the customer opening the door. In Italy there are many burial places where different bones, which have been part of the 'loved and lost,' are collected into one room and arranged in all manner of fancy forms around the walls. I have seen them in points and scollops, and often in the form of crosses; so Mr. Jenkins took the dead animals as the fancy part of the butcher's trade; and, with a taste like that which has made some men artists or sculptors, he made his shop look as pretty as he could.

It was two days before 'Thanksgiving' when an unusual crowd of men might be seen gathering at the little door.

Report had come of a great battle, in which the regiment had been engaged which was in part composed of Harland men; and the interest and anxiety were intense. As is usual with reports of distant engagements, everything was uncertain and unreliable; but that there were many killed all agreed, and each new comer mentioned new names as among the lost. There was one man who had ended a course of remarkable bravery with his death. Amidst the confusion and din of battle, he had seemed to be gifted with the power of making a distinct and honourable impression. Indeed, as the stories, at first only vague and half hinted, passed from mouth to mouth, they took new form and gloss; and when the last comer into Mr. Jenkins's shop repeated what he had heard in the train that very night, the men looked at one another as if a hero had been suddenly dropped down among them.

'Who would have thought it?' said Jem Jones. 'You know he never seemed to be one of the likely ones here. He was a fellow that hadn't any push in him. I hired him a while, after he gave up teaching, to work on my peat meadow; but somehow I always felt that his learning unfitted him for work. Why, there now, his hand was as white as a woman's, and I thought it hadn't half as much real grit in it as my Nancy's. There is no knowing what a man is until he dies. Mother has always been telling me so, and I seem to believe her now.'

'That 'ere Ned Randall,' broke in another man, ' didn't ever seem to have any pluck in him; he seemed a weak-minded fellow. I never was more surprised than when I heard he actually had enlisted. I should have