"Bien oblige, monsieur," replied the younger man, "but snuff-taking is an acquirement--I ought, perhaps, to say an accomplishment--to which as yet I cannot lay claim, and, in so far, my education may be said to be incomplete."
"'Tis a necessary part of a gentleman's curriculum--a pinch of Rappee or good Kendal Brown serves at once to soothe the nerves, disperse the vapors, and enliven the brain. But you are young yet, my dear sir--oh, les beaux jours de la jeunesse!--and, with luck, have many years before you for the cultivation of a habit which, unlike other habits I could name, the older you grow the more quiet satisfaction you derive from the practice of it. Amid the straits and disappointments of life, when his fortunes are at their lowest, and his fair-weather friends have fallen one by one away, many a man draws his truest consolation from his snuff-box."
"You speak like one grown old both in years and experience," said the other laughingly. He was recovering his sang-froid, and, the failure of his enterprise notwithstanding, was beginning to enjoy the adventure for the adventure's sake.
The highwayman gave vent to an audible sigh. "Experience keeps a dear school," he said, "and 'tis only fools who fail to learn at it."
And so for a time they rode on in silence. Then said the younger man, "You seem to know your way hereabouts pretty well."
"The home of my youth was no great distance away, and, as a lad, I wandered over these moors and fells till I grew to know them, as one might say, by heart."
"Have we much farther to go, may I ask?"
"Another ten minutes will bring us to our destination." With that he proceeded to remove his mask and stuff it into one of his pockets.
For a little while they jogged along side by side without speaking. The tract of country they were traversing was wild and desolate in the extreme. On every side stretched the bare swelling moorland--bare save for the short sparse grass and the many-hued mosses which grew in its hollows and more sheltered places, but left naked its huge ribs and bosses of granite, which showed through the surface in every direction, and seemed to crave the decent burial which only some great cataclysm of nature could give them. Here and there at wide intervals a narrow track-way unwound itself like a dusky ribbon till it was lost in the distance. These rude by-roads had been in use for more centuries than history or tradition knew of, and served to connect one outlying hamlet with another. Over them from time to time paced great droves of cattle and sheep on their way to one or other of the frequent fairs which in those days, far more than now, brought the country-side together and formed one of the most distinctive features of English rural life.
"Here we are at last," said the highwayman, as an indefinite mass of black buildings loomed vaguely before them--for the rain was over and gone, and the moon was again shining in a clear sky--which presently, as they drew nearer, took on the shape of a long, low, two-storied house, with a high-pitched roof and twisted chimneys, and having a group of detached outbuildings in the rear.