THE ASHEN FAGOT. BY THOMAS HUGHES, AUTHOR OF "TOM BROWN AT OXFORD," ETO. AT CHAPTER I. the little village T about four o'clock on Christmas Eve, a year or two back, two men trudged briskly up street of Lilburne, in the county of Wilts. They were both dressed in rough shooting-suits, and one carried a common game-bag, and the other a knapsack. Each of them had a stout stick in his hand. The elder, who might be six or seven and twenty, wore a strong reddish-brown beard. The rest of his rather broad face was well tanned by exposure to weather; he had a clear, merry gray eye, and an air of very British self-reliance about him. The younger, in his twentieth year, or thereabouts, wore also as much beard as nature had yet bestowed on him, and was tanned a ruddy brown. He was darker than his companion, and his complexion would have been sallow, but for the work of sun and air on it. There was the possibility of great nervous irritability and excitableness in the look of him; but this natural tendency of his constitution and temperament seemed, at least for the present, to be counteracted by robust health. The two stopped at the door of "The Wagoner's Rest," the only public house of Lilburne village. “Well, here we are then, at the last stage. farther do you say it is?" How much |