The farmer looked me slowly over from head to foot, with a dawning surprise.
"Thought you was a common tramper, I did," said he.
"Why, so I am," I answered, brushing the clinging hay from me.
"Trampers o' the road don't wear gentlemen's clothes—leastways, I never see one as did." Here his eyes wandered over me again, from my boots upward. Half-way up, they stopped, evidently arrested by my waistcoat, a flowered satin of the very latest cut, for which I had paid forty shillings in the Haymarket, scarcely a week before; and, as I looked down at it, I would joyfully have given it, and every waistcoat that was ever cut, to have had that forty shillings safe back in my pocket again.
"That be a mighty fine weskit, sir!"
"Do you think so?" said I.
"Ah, that I do—w'at might be the cost of a weskit the like o' that, now?"
"I paid forty shillings for it, in the Haymarket, in London, scarcely a week ago," I answered. The fellow very slowly closed one eye at the same time striking his nose three successive raps with his forefinger:
"Gammon!" said he.
"None the less, it's true," said I.