“Why, that’s all in my line,” said Sprott; “and there ben’t a tinker in the county that I vould recommend like myself, tho’f I say it.”
“You jest, good sir,” said the doctor, smiling pleasantly. “A man who can’t mend a hole in his own donkey can never demean himself by patching up my great kettle.”
“Lord, sir!” said the tinker, archly, “if I had known that poor Neddy had had two sitch friends in court, I’d have seen he vas a gintleman, and treated him as sitch.”
“Corpo di Bacco!” quoth the doctor, “though that jest’s not new, I think the tinker comes very well out of it.”
“True; but the donkey!” said the parson; “I’ve a great mind to buy it.”
“Permit me to tell you an anecdote in point,” said Dr. Riccabocca.
“Well?” said the parson, interrogatively.
“Once on a time,” pursued Riccabocca, “the Emperor Adrian, going to the public baths, saw an old soldier, who had served under him, rubbing his back against the marble wall. The emperor, who was a wise, and therefore a curious, inquisitive man, sent for the soldier, and asked him why he resorted to that sort of friction. ‘Because,’ answered the veteran, ‘I am too poor to have slaves to rub me down.’ The emperor was touched, and gave him slaves and money. The next day, when Adrian went to the baths, all the old men in the city were to be seen rubbing themselves against the marble as hard as they could. The emperor sent for them, and asked them the same question which he had put to the soldier; the cunning old rogues, of course, made the same answer. ‘Friends,’ said Adrian, ‘since there are so many of you, you will just rub one another!’ Mr. Dale, if you don’t want to have all the donkeys in the county with holes in their shoulders, you had better not buy the tinker’s!”
“It is the hardest thing in the world to do the least bit of good,” groaned the parson, as he broke a twig off the hedge nervously, snapped it in two, and flung away the fragments: one of them hit the donkey on the nose. If the ass could have spoken Latin he would have said, “Et tu, Brute!” As it was, he hung down his ears, and walked on.
“Gee hup,” said the tinker, and he followed the ass. Then stopping, he looked over his shoulder, and seeing that the parson’s eyes were gazing mournfully on his protege, “Never fear, your reverence,” cried the tinker, kindly, “I’ll not spite ‘un.”