"Not one of them, Mr. Pike. But you are very generous. I hope to catch a basketful very shortly—still, it is just possible that this may not occur. I will take them provisionally, and with many thanks. Now, will you add to the obligation, by telling, if your tutor has no objection, why he put you under such an awful veto?"
"My boy, you are welcome to tell Dr. Gronow. It was only a bit of thoughtlessness, and your punishment has been severe."
"I shall never touch cobbler's wax again on Sunday. But I wanted to finish a May-fly entirely of my own pattern; and so after church I was touching up his wings, when in comes Mr. Penniloe with his London glasses on."
"And I am proud to assure you, Dr. Gronow, that the lad never tried to deceive me. I should have been deeply pained, if he had striven to conceal it."
"Well done! That speaks well for both of you. Pike, you are a straight-forward fellow. You shall have a day on my brook once a week. Is there anything more I can do for you?"
"Yes sir, unless it is too much to ask; and perhaps Mr. Penniloe would like to hear it too. Hopper and I have had many talks about it; and he says that I am superstitious. But his plan of things is to cut for his life over everything that he can see, without stopping once to look at it. And when he has jumped over it, he has no more idea what it was, than if he had run under it. He has no faith in anything that he does not see, and he never sees much of anything."
"Ha, Master Pike. You describe it well;" said the doctor, looking at him with much interest. "Scepticism without enquiry. Reverend, that Hop-jumper is not the right stuff for a bishop."
"If you please, Dr. Gronow, we will not discuss that now," the parson replied with a glance at young Pike, which the doctor understood and heeded: "What is it, my boy, that you would ask of Dr. Gronow, after serious debate with Peckover?"
"Nothing sir, nothing. Only we would like to know, if it is not disagreeable to any one, how he could have managed from the very first to understand all about Sir Thomas Waldron, and to know that we were all making fools of ourselves. I say that he must have seen a dream, like Jacob, or have been cast into a vision, like so many other saints. But Hopper says no; if there was any inspiration, Dr. Gronow was more likely to have got it from the Devil."