The plan was simple enough, and I strolled out and along the road, and then entered a gate, to make a short cut along the hedge side of the fields.
The evening was glorious, and after a broiling day the soft moist odours that came from the copses dotted here and there seemed delightfully refreshing, and so I strolled on and on till I was only a short distance from the cottage, which was separated from me by a couple of fields, when I turned slowly toward a corner of the enclosure I was in, where there was a pond and a patch of moist land where weeds never noticed towered up in abundance, and, to my surprise, I caught sight of Magglin seated on the bank of the pond, with his feet hanging close to the water, and apparently engaged in his evening toilet. It seemed to me that he must have been washing his face, and that he was now wiping it upon some great leaves which he plucked from time to time.
“No, he isn’t,” I said to myself the next moment. “He has been poaching, and saw me coming. It’s all a pretence to throw me off the scent;” and I went on, my way being close by him, and there he was rubbing away at his face with the leaves, while I glanced here and there in search of a wire set for rabbit or hare, though I shrewdly suspected that the wire he had been setting would be over in the copse beyond the pond, in the expectation of getting a pheasant.
He was so quick of hearing that he could detect a footstep some distance off, but this time he turned round sharply when I exclaimed,—
“Hallo, Magglin!”
“Eh—I— Oh, how de do, sir?”
“Better than you do,” I said sharply. “What have you been doing to your face?”
“Face? Oh, rubbing it a bit, sir, that’s all. Good as washing.”
“Dock leaves,” I said. “What, have you stung yourself?”
“Oh yes, I forgot that, sir. Just a little bit, sir. I was coming through the hedge down below there, and a ’ormous old nettle flew back and hit me acrost the cheek. But it aren’t nothing.”