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mother.”
    Roboshobery’s jaw dropped, and he caught his quid with a quick snatch of
the hand. “What!” he cried, “Mrs Mart’n! No!”
    “Ay, ‘tis so. An’ ‘tis arl about, too. There aren’t a woman in Hadleigh
‘ud take a bit o’ pie from her to-day; no, nor nothen else. Nor go near
her.”
    “Mrs Mart’n!”
    “Ay; an’ some do say her niece is bad as she.”
    Roboshobery stared, open mouthed, for ten seconds. Then he brought his
fist on the table with a shock that made the bottle jump. “‘Tis a lie,
damme!” he said. “‘Tis a lie!”
    “Very like. But they do say it.”
    “Why, her boy Jack be a fightin’ the deadly Rooshans this very minute!”
Roboshobery pursued, with a fixed stare, and a logic of his own.
    “An’ they do say ‘tis proved agin her.”
    “An’ I fit the French meself, when I was that high, damme!” Roboshobery
went on regardless, with the same stare and the same logic, extending his
hand a little higher than the table.
    “Well!” Prentice ejaculated, impartially, and finished his glass.
    “That high, damme!” Roboshobery repeated without moving his hand. He kept
it in the air for a few seconds, and then let it drop, and gave his mouth the
quid again. “Howsomdever,” he went on, “if the women sez it, they’ll stick to
it, an’ argufyin’ woan’t change ‘em.” And then, with fresh heat, he repeated:
“But it’s a lie!”
    “There be Jobson o’ Wickford,” Prentice said, suddenly rising and looking
through the window. “It’s odds he’s got a Chronicle .”
    The two men hastened to the door and hailed Jobson of Wickford, who was
pulling up at the Crown. As it happened he had brought a copy of yesterday’s
paper with him, for the first Hadleigh friend who might demand it; and soon
Roboshobery Dove, with pains and slow spelling, was informed of the war news.
And ten minutes later he had Steve Lingood by the arm at the smithy door, and
was confusing the news of the burning of the docks at Uleaborg and Brahestad,
and of the retreat of the Russians from Silistria, by a mixed process of
telling it verbally with five or six diversely-pronounced names for each
place, and insisting on the smith reading for himself, while the paper was
violently brandished about his face and ears.
----
V. — AN INTERRUPTED SONG
    HADLEIGH FAIR waxed and roared. It was not the way of
Cunning Murrell, in general, to be seen at daytime; his was a silent, sudden
presence of the night, and there were tales of the distances he travelled
(and hints of the means whereby) that were told in whispers only, and not to
strangers. But on fair day he was sought by the sick and the troubled of many
villages, and he dispensed herbs and charms to many that travelled half
across the county to fetch them. There were, indeed, those who came farther,
for Murrell’s fame as physician and cattle doctor spread across the county,
even to the Suffolk border, and he was esteemed far beyond Bedlow of Rawreth,
who was a most distinguished character; while in matters of greater
abstruseness and difficulty, the baffling of witches, the recovery of lost
property, and the bringing to the altar of fickle lovers, he had no rival
whatever. But it was not his way to sit at the receipt of custom, taking in
turn the many that resorted to him. Rather he must be sought and solicited,
and they were the lucky that were able to buy his counsel. So that one might
always see throughout the most of fair day, in the narrow lane where his
cottage stood and away from the merry crowd in Hadleigh street, certain
pensive women and a few anxious girls, their eyes solicitously turned toward
the cunning man’s door, their hands all willing to click the latch, though
each fearful of rebuff; sometimes, too, an awkward and shame-faced man. So it
was in the lane this day. But in the noisy street the round of gaiety spun
with a dazzle, and in the afternoon, long ere the Fire-eater had