ght be I
couldn't exactly say, 'cause he was having a drink with his back
turned to the door. But he was a traveller, that I know."

"A traveller? I wonder whether that was the one!" exclaimed Austin.
"Had he a dark-brown face? Or a wooden leg? Or a scar down one of his
cheeks?"

"Not as I see," answered Lubin, beginning to sweep the lawn. "But a
traveller he was, because the barmaid told me so. Travelled all over
the country in bonnets."

"Travelled in bonnets?" cried Austin. "What _do_ you mean, Lubin? How
can a man go travelling about the country in a bonnet? Had he a bonnet
on when you saw him drinking in the bar?"

"Lor', Master Austin, wherever was you brought up?" exclaimed Lubin,
in grave amazement at the youth's ignorance. "When a gentleman
'travels' in anything, it means he goes about getting orders for it.
Now this here gentleman was agent, I take it, for some big millinery
shop in London, and come down here wi' boxes an' boxes o' bonnets, an'
tokes, and all sorts o' female headgear as women goes about in----"

"In short, he was a commercial traveller," said Austin, very mildly.
"You see, my dear Lubin, we have been talking of different things. I
wasn't thinking of a gentleman who hawks haberdashery. When I said
traveller, I meant a man who goes tramping across Africa, and shoots
elephants, and gets snowed up at the North Pole, and has all sorts of
uncomfortable and quite incredible adventures. They always have faces
as brown as an old trunk, and generally limp when they walk. That's
the sort of person I'm looking out for. You haven't seen anyone like
that, have you?"

"Nay--nary a one," said Lubin, shaking his head. "Would he have been
putting up at one o' the inns, now, or staying long wi' some o' the
gentry?"

"I haven't the slightest idea," acknowledged Austin.

"Might as well go about looking for a ram wi' five feet," remarked
Lubin. "Some things you can't find 'cause they don't exist, and other
things you can't find 'cause there's too many of 'em. And as you don't
know nothing about this gentleman, and wouldn't know him if you met
him in the street permiscuous, I take it you'll have to wait to see
what he looks like till he turns up again of his own accord. 'Tain't
in reason as you can go up to every old gentleman with a brown face
as you never see before an' ask him if he's ever been snowed up at the
North Pole and why he hasn't got a wooden leg. He'd think, as likely
as not, as you was tryi