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Milly and Olly wanted sorely to go too, but there was no persuading Nana to let them go without their father to fish them out if they tumbled in, so they had to content themselves with dangling their legs over the first stepping-stone and watching the others. But perhaps you don't quite known what stepping-stones are?

"You take Clara round by the bridge, and I will get over the stepping-stones." And so the lad, with his rod in his hand, began to descend the steep bank. "I can get over the stepping-stones, too, Patrick," said she. "Can you though, my gay young woman? You'll be over your ankles if you do. That rain didn't come down yesterday for nothing."

Beginning as a poor and ignorant boy, even less provided with props and stepping-stones than were his associates, he had worked his way to a position of ordinary professional and political distinction. He was not, like Douglas, a brilliant success. He was not, like Grant, an apparently hopeless failure. He had achieved as much and as little as hundreds of others had achieved.

His hair was of the same pure and infantine gold that it had been when he charged down on the Eldest Statesman on the stepping-stones of the Ownashee; his blue eyes had lost none of their candour; the touch of gilding on his upper lip was effective only at short range, but, when taken in connection with a very white and even set of teeth, and a beaming and ever-ready smile, it carried considerable weight.

But the river below the Abbey is to be traversed by stepping-stones, which, to the female uninitiated foot, appear to be full of danger. The Wharfe here is no insignificant brook, to be overcome by a long stride and a jump.

Joel sat bolt upright as well as he could, being crammed in between a big fat man and his kind friend, and directed this way and that way, his tears all gone, and before any one could hardly think twice, the pair of black horses and the jingling harness and big carriage had stopped before the little brown house, and the doctor was springing over the stepping-stones in such a lively fashion that Joel had to run to keep up with him, until there they were, with Grandma Bascom waddling around in search of some herbs that were drying in the corner of the woodshed, and Polly still holding David's hand as he lay on the pile of grain bags.

He remembered how all his past troubles seemed as only stepping-stones to supernal heights, how he could have kissed them for thankfulness that he had been forced by an all-wise Providence over the agony of the ascent to such rapture. Immediately his thoughts centred upon chloroform.

He was quelled. Speech suddenly became impossible to him. He was struck again with that sense of a will firmer and more tenacious than his own, which had visited him in a slight passing way on the first evening they ever met, and now filled him with a kind of despair. As they pushed silently along the edge of the dripping meadow, he noticed with a pang that the stepping-stones lay just below them.

He talked in very rapid jerks, always seeming to be about to come to rest and then instantaneously bounding off again, rather like a man bounding along stepping-stones, red-hot stepping-stones that each time burnt his feet and set him flying off again. He had been in the Bombay house of a firm of indigo merchants and there had known Aunt Belle and Uncle Pyke.

'They said no harm, poor boys, she replied reproachfully. Poor John was dumb with perception. The gentle hint upon which he would have eagerly spoken only one short day ago was now like fire to his wound. They presently came to some stepping-stones across a brook. John crossed first without turning his head, and Anne, just lifting the skirt of her dress, crossed behind him.