The tinker stopped, and Mr. Avenel stalked up to him. "What the devil are you doing on my property, lurking by my hedge? I suspect you are an incendiary!"
"I be a tinker," quoth Mr. Sprott, not louting low, (for a sturdy republican was Mr. Sprott,) but like a lord of humankind,
"Pride in his port, defiance in his eye."
Mr. Avenel's fingers itched to knock the tinker's villanous hat off his Jacobinical head, but he repressed the undignified impulse by thrusting both hands deep into his trowsers' pockets.
"A tinker?" he cried—"that's a vagrant; and I'm a magistrate, and I've a great mind to send you to the treadmill—that I have. What do you do here, I say? You have not answered my question?"
"What does I do 'ere?" said Mr. Sprott. "Vy, you had better ax my crakter of the young gent I saw you talking with just now; he knows me!"
"What! my nephew know you?"
"W—hew," whistled the tinker, "your nephew is it, sir? I have a great respek for your family. I have known Mrs. Fairfilt, the vasherwoman, this many a year. I 'umbly ax your pardon." And he took off his hat this time.
Mr. Avenel turned red and white in a breath. He growled out something inaudible, turned on his heel, and strode off. The tinker watched him as he had watched Leonard, and then dogged the uncle as he had dogged the nephew. I don't presume to say that there was cause and effect in what happened that night, but it was what is called "a curious coincidence" that that night one of Richard Avenel's ricks was set on fire; and that that day he called Mr. Sprott an incendiary. Mr. Sprott was a man of very high spirit and did not forgive an insult easily. His nature was inflammatory, and so was that of the lucifers which he always carried about him, with his tracts and glue-pots. The next morning there was an inquiry made for the tinker, but he had disappeared from the neighborhood.