Toot, toot, toot. “He’s goin’ for’n braave an’ no mistake. Wonder who eh es?”
Toot, toot, toot.
By this time heads were sticking out of all the upper windows save one behind which a poor woman lay sick.
In the street below, Trudger, the constable, whom the first blast of the horn had stricken with the trembles, was now parading as if the incessant tooting were as ordinary an occurrence as the midnight chiming of the village clock.
“Well, doan’t ee hear nawthin’?” said the parish clerk, taking upon himself, in the absence of the parson, the duty of spokesman. Toot, toot. “Iss, iss, I hear un right enuf. ’Tes no business o’ mine, ’tes outside my beat.” Toot, toot, toot. “ ’Tes in the corner o’ the park, I tell ee, down below the bastion. I’m sartin on et.”
“No tedn, ’tes over in Paul parish.”
“Ain’t afeerd of the auld Squire and his hounds, are ee?” said a woman with a shrill voice. “I’ll come wy ee ef thee art.”
At length the constable, stung by many taunts, was driven out by the force of upstairs opinion, and set off at the rate of about two miles an hour, to show that he was not to be hurried.
Thus it chanced that the farmer and the constable, attracted by the same cause, but impelled by different motives, were approaching the Earthstopper from opposite directions. Trewheela’s naturally high temper was not sweetened by his sudden awakening out of a dream in which he found himself selling basket after basket of butter at half-a-crown a pound, and the way he strode across his bridge augured badly for the disturber of the peace if the farmer could set hands on him.
Hearing him coming, the Earthstopper, on whom the truth slowly broke, blew a stirring blast—for was there not the otter to be kept up?—and hid himself where, without being seen himself, he could see what should happen. In a very few minutes Trewheela was standing on the very spot from which the tooting had seemed to come, and a casual observer might have thought from the eager way he looked here, there, and everywhere, that he was mightily taken by the landscape. The scene was indeed very beautiful, and chastened as it was by the silvering rays it would have calmed many a savage breast. It worked no soothing effect on the farmer, whose anger at not finding the offender became unbounded. He regretted that he had not brought his sheep-dog as well as a horse-whip. In all the impotence of baffled rage he stood still under the shadow of a tree, but to his great relief soon heard someone stealing along the other side of the thick-set hedge which separated him from the park. “Ah, the’rt theere, arta, Maister Boogler? Out of breeth with blawin’, are ee? Thee’ll be singin’ a defrant toon in a minit, I reckon,” he whispered to himself with malicious delight as his hand tightened on the handle of the whip. Within a few yards of where he had been standing was a narrow gap; and the farmer, who was moving as stealthily as his unlaced boots would permit, at the same pace as the constable, in making for the gap nearly trod on Andrew’s head. We will not, however, dwell on the feelings of the latter, for the constable, undignified as is the way he is being stalked, claims our attention.