l. "Gentleman's got out and walked," said Crickledon. He was informed
that somebody was visible inside. "Gentleman's wife, mayhap," he said.
His friends indulged in their privilege of thinking what they liked, and
there was the usual silence of tongues in the shop. He furnished them
sound and motion for their amusement, and now and then a scrap of
conversation; and the sedater spirits dwelling in his immediate
neighbourhood were accustomed to step in and see him work up to
supper-time, instead of resorting to the more turbid and costly
excitement of the public-house.

Crickledon looked up from the measurement of a thumb-line. In the doorway
stood a bearded gentleman, who announced himself with the startling
exclamation, "Here's a pretty pickle!" and bustled to make way for a man
well known to them as Ned Crummins, the upholsterer's man, on whose back
hung an article of furniture, the condition of which, with a condensed
brevity of humour worthy of literary admiration, he displayed by mutely
turning himself about as he entered.

"Smashed!" was the general outcry.

"I ran slap into him," said the gentleman. "Who the deuce!--no bones
broken, that's one thing. The fellow--there, look at him: he's like a
glass tortoise."

"It's a chiwal glass," Crickledon remarked, and laid finger on the star
in the centre.

"Gentleman ran slap into me," said Crummins, depositing the frame on the
floor of the shop.

"Never had such a shock in my life," continued the gentleman. "Upon my
soul, I took him for a door: I did indeed. A kind of light flashed from
one of your houses here, and in the pitch dark I thought I was at the
door of old Mart Tinman's house, and dash me if I did n't go in--crash!
But what the deuce do you do, carrying that great big looking-glass at
night, man? And, look here tell me; how was it you happened to be going
glass foremost when you'd got the glass on your back?"

"Well, 't ain't my fault, I knows that," rejoined Crummins. "I came along
as careful as a man could. I was just going to bawl out to Master Tinman,
'I knows the way, never fear me'; for I thinks I hears him call from his
house, 'Do ye see the way?' and into me this gentleman runs all his
might, and smash goes the glass. I was just ten steps from Master
Tinman's gate, and that careful, I reckoned every foot I put down, that I
was; I knows I did, though."

"Why, it was me calling, 'I'm sure I can't see the way.'

"You heard me, you donkey!" retor