"Ey, ey; he's his father's son."
The wrestler, surrounded by a little multitude of boys, who clung to his sparse garments on every side, made his way to a tent.
At the same moment a ludicrous figure forced a passage through the crowd, and came to a stand in the middle of the green. It was a diminutive creature, mounted on a pony that carried its owner on a saddle immediately below its neck, and a pair of paniers just above its tail. The rider was an elderly man with shaggy eyebrows and beard of mingled black and gray. His swarthy, keen wizened face was twisted into grotesque lines beneath a pair of little blinking eyes, which seemed to say that anybody who refused to see that they belonged to a perfectly, wideawake son of old Adam made a portentous mistake. He was the mountain peddler, and to-day, at least, his visit was opportune.
"Lasses, here's for you! Look you, here's Gubblum Oglethorpe, pony and all."
"Why, didsta ever see the like—Gubblum's getten hissel into a saddle!"
Gubblum, from his seat on the pony, twisted one half of his wrinkled face awry, and said:
"In course I have! But it's a vast easier getting into this saddle nor getting out of it, I can tell you!"
"Why, how's that, Gubblum?" cried a voice from the crowd.
"What, man, did you never hear of the day I bought it?"
Sundry shakes of many heads were the response.