Now as I sat, feeling strangely lonely and disconsolate, I espied a bulbous parcel lying in reach and, opening this, found it to contain a small loaf, three slices of bacon and a piece of cheese, together with a folded paper whereon I deciphered these words inscribed in painfully neat characters.
YOUNG SIR:
What is one thing at night is another in the morning, so I have gone my way and taken my course appointed. If you should wish to meet me again, which would be strange, I think, you shall hear of me at the White Hart nigh to Sevenoaks, or the Chequers at Tonbridge or from mostly any of the padding kind, since the high road is my home and has been long. I am glad you liked my verses, I have more I could have read you and I think better of yours than you think I thought, though you have taken Lord Byron for your model I think and he is only a poet when he forgets to be a fine gentleman. May you prosper, young sir, and find your manhood which I reckon is none so far to seek. And this is the true desire of me.
Jeremiah Jarvis.
Tinker and occasionally literary cove.
I have left you some breakfast also fire to cook same, eat hearty. You will find a frying-pan in a cleft of the tree we slept under.
Thereupon, being much more hungry than was my wont, I came to the tree in question and presently found a roomy cleft where was the frying-pan, sure enough. And now, having made up the fire, I set about cooking my breakfast for the first time in my life and found it no great business, turning the rashers this way and that in the pan until what with their delectable sight and smell, my hunger grew to a voracious desire that amazed me by its intensity. So, placing the frying-pan on the grass between my knees, I began to eat with the aid of my penknife and a hunch of crusty bread, and never in all my days enjoyed anything more.
In due time, the bacon being despatched together with the greater part of the loaf and cheese, I lay propped against the tree, blinking in the sun and drowsily content. But this blissful aftermath was presently marred by haunting memories of tea, coffee and creamy chocolate until at last, roused by an insistent and ever-growing thirst, I arose, minded to seek some means of assuaging this appetite. Thus, having scrubbed out the frying-pan with a handful of bracken, I restored it to the tree and set out. After some little while I came on a brook bubbling pleasantly amid mossy stones and yet, though it looked sweet and clean enough, I could not bring myself to drink of it, being too proud-stomached, and must go wandering on, plagued by my thirst, until, chancing on the same brook or another, I could resist no longer, and stretching myself full-length upon the bank I stooped to the murmurous water and drank my fill and found it none so ill, although a little brackish.
As the day advanced, the cool wind died away so that what with the heat and this unwonted exercise I grew distressed and was about to cast myself down in the shade of a hedge, when I espied a small tavern bowered in trees some little distance along the road, very pleasant to see, and hasted thitherward accordingly. I was yet some distance away when I became aware that something untoward was afoot, for, borne to my ears, came a sound of excited voices, dominated all at once by one deep and hoarse and loud in virtuous indignation.
"Drunk me beer, I tell 'ee—every drop! Drunk me beer at one gullup so quick's a flash—the 'eartless ruffin!"