the road. 'You be a Knollsea boy: have anything reached
your young ears about what's in the wind there, David Straw?'

'No, nothing: except that 'tis going to be Christmas day in five weeks:
and then a hide-bound bull is going to be killed if he don't die afore
the time, and gi'ed away by my lord in three-pound junks, as a reward to
good people who never curse and sing bad songs, except when they be
drunk; mother says perhaps she will have some, and 'tis excellent if well
stewed, mother says.'

'A very fair chronicle for a boy to give, but not what I asked for. When
you try to answer a old man's question, always bear in mind what it was
that old man asked. A hide-bound bull is good when well stewed, I make
no doubt--for they who like it; but that's not it. What I said was, do
you know why three fokes, a rich man, a middling man, and a poor man,
should want horses for Knollsea afore seven o'clock in the morning on a
blinking day in Fall, when everything is as wet as a dishclout, whereas
that's more than often happens in fine summer weather?'

'No--I don't know, John hostler.'

'Then go home and tell your mother that ye be no wide-awake boy, and that
old John, who went to school with her father afore she was born or
thought o', says so. . . . Chok' it all, why should I think there's
sommat going on at Knollsea? Honest travelling have been so rascally
abused since I was a boy in pinners, by tribes of nobodies tearing from
one end of the country to t'other, to see the sun go down in salt water,
or the moon play jack-lantern behind some rotten tower or other, that,
upon my song, when life and death's in the wind there's no telling the
difference!'

'I like their sixpences ever so much.'

'Young sonny, don't you answer up to me when you baint in the
story--stopping my words in that fashion. I won't have it, David. Now
up in the tallet with ye, there's a good boy, and down with another lock
or two of hay--as fast as you can do it for me.'

The boy vanished under the archway, and the hostler followed at his
heels. Meanwhile the carriage bearing Mr. Mountclere and Sol was
speeding on its way to Enckworth. When they reached the spot at which
the road forked into two, they left the Knollsea route, and keeping
thence under the hills for the distance of five or six miles, drove into
Lord Mountclere's park. In ten minutes the house was before them, framed
in by dripping trees.

Mountclere jumped out, and entered