"Ow, well, yow moi soy that-mak'th 'em cruel thin then, it do; but what can bodies do i' th'ago? Bot it's a bad thing, it is. Harken yow to me. Didst ever know one called Porter, to yowr trade?"
I thought a little, and recollected a man of that name, who had worked with us a year or two before—a great friend of a certain scatter-brained Irish lad, brother of Crossthwaite's wife.
"Well, I did once, but I have lost sight of him twelve months, or more."
The old man faced sharp round on me, swinging the little gig almost over, and then twisted himself back again, and put on a true farmer-like look of dogged, stolid reserve. We rolled on a few minutes in silence.
"Dee yow consider, now, that a mon mought be lost, like, into Lunnon?"
"How lost?"
"Why, yow told o' they sweaters—dee yow think a mon might get in wi' one o' they, and they that mought be looking for un not to vind un?"
"I do, indeed. There was a friend of that man Porter got turned away from our shop, because he wouldn't pay some tyrannical fine for being saucy, as they called it, to the shopman; and he went to a sweater's—and then to another; and his friends have been tracking him up and down this six months, and can hear no news of him."
"Aw! guide us! And what'n, think yow, be gone wi' un?"
"I am afraid he has got into one of those dens, and has pawned his clothes, as dozens of them do, for food, and so can't get out."