Some body, almost every day, cut off a tolerably large piece from the beef or mutton, or whatever kind of meat there chanced to be in the cellar. And no body knew any thing about it. Hannah was fidelity itself; Jim was beyond suspicion; Adolphus never went into the cellar, scarcely out of the library, in fact. The Captain! could it be her brother? Miss Augusta watched. She saw him do it. She saw him covertly draw his jack-knife from his pocket, and purloin a piece of beautiful rump-steak, then wrap it up in paper, put it in his pocket, and walk off whistling, as if nothing had happened. "The widow is at the bottom of this!" was the thought that flashed through the mind of Augusta. She was indirectly correct. The widow was at the bottom of the theft, and I will tell you how. I have mentioned a large, mangy dog, of disreputable character, Mr. Mewker's property, and "Bose" by name. Whenever the Captain drove up the path to the house of his friend, there, beside the step of the wagon, from the time it passed the gate until it reached the porch, was this dog, with a tail short as pie-crust, that never wagged; thick, wicked eyes, and a face that did not suggest fidelity and sagacity, but treachery and rapine, dead sheep, and larceny great or small. And although the Captain was a stout, active, well-framed man, with a rosy cheek, a bright eye, and a sprightly head of hair, yet he was afraid of that dog. And therefore, the Captain, to conciliate Bose, brought him every day some choice morsel from his own kitchen; and as he did not dare to tell Augusta, the same was abstracted in the manner already described.
Here I must mention a peculiarity in Captain Belgrave's character. He never saw a dog without thinking of hydrophobia; he never bathed on the beautiful beach in the rear of his house without imagining every chip in the water, or ripple on the wave, to be the dorsal fin of some voracious shark. When he drove home at night, it was with fear and trembling, for an assassin might be lurking in the bushes; and if he passed a sick neighbor, he walked off with smallpox, measles, typhoid, and whooping-cough trundling at his heels. In a word, he was the most consummate coward in Little-Crampton. It was for this reason he had built and slept in the tower; and what with reading of pirates, buccaneers, Captain Kidd, and Black Beard, his
