was Jack—a fact I was fortunate enough to ascertain from a pretty damsel, who walked up with him to the ground one evening, and who, on seeing him bowl out Tom Cope, could not help exclaiming in soliloquy, as she stood at few yards behind us, looking on with all her heart, “Well done, Jack!” That moment built up all my hopes; the next knocked them down. I thought I had clutched him; but, willing to make assurance doubly sure, I turned to my pretty neighbour—(Jack Hatch, too, had a sweetheart)—and said, in a tone half affirmative and half interrogatory, “That young man who plays so well is Jack Hatch?” “No, ma’am, Jack Bolton!”—and Jack Hatch remained still a sound, a name, a mockery.
Well, at last I ceased to look for him, and might possibly have forgotten my curiosity, had not every week produced some circumstance to relumine that active female passion. I seemed beset by his name and his presence, invisibly as it were. Will-o’-the-wisp is nothing to him. Puck, in that famous Midsummer Dream, was a quiet goblin compared to Jack Hatch. He haunts one in dark places. The fiddler, whose merry tunes come ringing across the orchard in a winter’s night from farmer White’s great barn, setting the whole village a-dancing, is Jack Hatch. The whistler, who trudges homeward at dusk, up Kibes-lane, outpiping the nightin-
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