“I be main dry,” said the blacksmith.
“Mebbe you’ll stand us a quart, paason?” said Jim, touching his forelock.
“Will you sell me this little piece of brass?” said Felix.
“Aw, you med take un; he bean’t no vallee to we.”
Felix gave them half-a-crown for the relic, and rode on slowly, while the group adjourned to the inn to drink it, leaving the donkey, their tools, and the bucket by the roadside among the thistles.
“I knaws it bean’t nothing but the trigger-guard of one of them ould hoss-pistols,” the patriarch persisted, “them vlint-locks with brass-barrels—I minds um.”
Felix, as he rode away saddened, thought to himself: “That we should come to this—made in the Divine image, and thrown at last into a stable-bucket! The limbs that bounded over the sward, the nostrils that scented the clover, and the eyes that watched and pondered, perhaps as mine did but now, over the sunset! Ah, the tinker’s ass, browsing on the thistles, is thrusting his nose into the bucket, I see, to sniff contemptuously at it! ‘Let us rejoice’—what a satire—”
“Hi, there! Hoi, you, measter!”
He looked back, saw the landlord panting after him, and drew rein and waited till he came up. What he wanted was to know whether Felix could tell him any further particulars respecting the sudden death of Valentine’s dark horse that had taken place very early that morning, during a private trial upon the downs. One of the men at the inn had recognised Felix as a friend of Valentine, and the landlord said everybody about there was so mixed up and interested in the horse that he had made bold to ask. Felix was quite taken by surprise. The news had not reached Greene Ferne when he called; probably Valentine, after the accident, had been too occupied to come down from the training-stables some miles up among the hills.
“What was the cause?” he asked, after explaining that he knew nothing of it.