After venting that brief soliloquy he sat silent a little while, till Leonard was nearly out of sight; then rose, resumed his fardel, and creeping quick along the hedgerows, followed Leonard towards the town. Just in the last field, as he looked over the hedge, he saw Leonard accosted by a gentleman of comely mien and important swagger. That gentleman soon left the young man, and came, whistling loud, up the path, and straight towards the tinker. Mr. Sprott looked round, but the hedge was too neat to allow of a good hiding-place, so he put a bold front on it, and stepped forth like a man. But, alas for him! before he got into the public path, the proprietor of the land, Mr. Richard Avenel (for the gentleman was no less a personage), had spied out the trespasser, and called to him with a “Hillo, fellow,” that bespoke all the dignity of a man who owns acres, and all the wrath of a man who beholds those acres impudently invaded.
The tinker stopped, and Mr. Avenel stalked up to him. “What the devil are you doing on my property, lurking by my hedge? I suspect you are an incendiary!”
“I be a tinker,” quoth Mr. Sprott, not louting low, for a sturdy republican was Mr. Sprott, but, like a lord of human kind,—
“Pride in his port, defiance in his eye.”
Mr. Avenel’s fingers itched to knock the tinker’s villanous hat off his jacobinical head, but he repressed the undignified impulse by thrusting both hands deep into his trousers’ pockets.
“A tinker!” he cried,—“that’s a vagrant; and I’m a magistrate, and I’ve a great mind to send you to the treadmill,—that I have. What do you do here, I say? You have not answered my question.”
“What does I do ‘ere?” said Mr. Sprott. “Vy, you had better ax my crakter of the young gent I saw you talking with just now; he knows me.”
“What! my nephew knows you?”
“W-hew,” whistled the tinker, “your nephew is it, sir? I have a great respek for your family. I ‘ve knowed Mrs. Fairfilt the vashervoman this many a year. I ‘umbly ax your pardon.” And he took off his hat this time.
Mr. Avenel turned red and white in a breath. He growled out something inaudible, turned on his heel, and strode off. The tinker watched him as he had watched Leonard, and then dogged the uncle as he had dogged the nephew. I don’t presume to say that there was cause and effect in what happened that night, but it was what is called “a curious coincidence” that that night one of Richard Avenel’s ricks was set on fire, and that that day he had called Mr. Sprott an incendiary. Mr. Sprott was a man of a very high spirit, and did not forgive an insult easily. His nature was inflammatory, and so was that of the lucifers which he always carried about him, with his tracts and glue-pots.