The Golden Scarecrow

When Hugh Seymour was nine years of age he was sent from Ceylon where his parents lived to be educated in England. His relations having for the most part settled in foreign countries he spent his holidays as a very minute and pale-faced paying guest in various houses where other children were of more importance than he or where children as a race were of no importance at all. It was in this way that he became during certain months of 1889 and 1890 and '91 a resident in the family of the Rev. William Lasher Vicar of Clinton St. Mary that large rambling village on the edge of Roche St. Mary Moor in South Glebeshire. He spent there the two Christmases of 1890 and 1891 (when he was ten and eleven years of age) and it is with the second of these that the following incident and indeed the whole of this book has to do. Hugh Seymour could not at the period of which I write be called an attractive child; he was not even interesting or unusual. He was very minutely made with bones so brittle that it seemed that at any moment he might crack and splinter into sharp little pieces; and I am afraid that no one would have minded very greatly had this occurred.