"Heaven bless your honour!" said honest Joe, striking his spade perpendicularly into the earth, and walking with more than usual alacrity towards the close-cut, quickset hedge which separated Mr. Jarvis's garden from the high road.
From the quickset hedge aforesaid he now raised, with all due delicacy, a well-worn and somewhat dilapidated jacket, of a stuff by drapers most pseudonymously termed "everlasting." Alack! alack! what is there to which tempus edax rerum will accord that epithet?—In its high and palmy days it had been all of a piece; but as its master's eye now fell upon it, the expression of his countenance seemed to say with Octavian,
"Those days are gone, Floranthe!"
It was now, from frequent patching, a coat not unlike that of the patriarch, one of many colours.
Joseph Washford inserted his wrists into the corresponding orifices of the tattered garment, and with a steadiness of circumgyration, to be acquired only by long and sufficient practice, swung it horizontally over his ears, and settled himself into it.
"Confound your old jacket!" cried a voice from the other side the hedge, "keep it down, you rascal! don't you see my horse is frightened at it?"
"Sensible beast!" apostrophized Joseph, "I've been frighten'd at it myself every day for the last two years!"
The gardener cast a rueful glance at its sleeve, and pursued his way to the door of the back kitchen.
"Joe," said Mrs. Witherspoon, a fat, comely dame, of about five-and-forty, "Joe, your master is but too good to you; he is always kind and considerate. Joe, he has desired me to give you his old wig."