Читать книгу Charles Peace, or The Adventures of a Notorious Burglar онлайн

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The young lady who the maid had told him was Miss Stanbridge appeared to be the real mistress of the house.

She professed to be very pleased to see him, and spoke in a kind manner when addressing him.

Alf was quite charmed with her. He did not remember to have seen anyone who pleased him better.

She asked him several questions about his former life, and soon extracted the history of all his offences and troubles.

At first he touched very tenderly upon the former, but Miss Stanbridge’s manner encouraged him to make a clean breast of it. She seemed to view misdemeanours in so charitable a light that he took heart of grace and told her all.

She laughed immoderately when he gave her an account of the hare being tied round his neck, and his selling it after all to the bird ensnarer.

She inveighed against the game laws as bitterly as any sworn abolitionist could have done.

Alf Purvin was duly impressed with the justness of her remarks, as her sentiments coincided with his own.

She concluded by saying that it would be just as fair and reasonable to make laws for birds’ eggs as for hares, and that so far from blaming a starving fellow-creature for taking one animal out of a wood which perhaps held hundreds of them, she could scarcely blame him for taking a sheep or a goose or a fowl from those that were over-rich to give to those who were poor.