Page:Robert Barr - Lord Stranleigh Philanthropist.djvu/183

 they could lay their hands on, even to the bed on which his wife and her new-born child lay. I often wonder if that little Englishman, when he grew up, wished for another war so that he might revenge the cowardly attack on his parents. The robbery took place as night was falling, and it happened that at the moment the miller held in a bag his year's earnings, represented by good British gold. He ran upstairs and flung the bag out into the dusk, hoping it would thus escape the searchers, who, however, were not easily baffled. They took the miller's lantern and searched outside for anything that could be found, and next morning the privateer was gone.

"The miller was up at daybreak, and became more and more despondent as he failed to find the bag. When called in to breakfast he raised his hands and his eyes toward heaven, deploring his ruin, and then, in the notch of a large tree adjacent to the mill-house, he saw the leathern bag, which had never fallen to the ground at all, and had been tied so well that not a coin escaped."

The two slowly climbed the very steep hill.

"Where have we got to?" gasped Blake, rather out of breath.

"I told you. Lannacombe Mill."