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 had 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.

CHAPTER XVI.

It was a fortunate thing that the _dejeune dansant_ so absorbed Mr.
Richard Avenel's thoughts, that even the conflagration of his rick could
not scare away the graceful and poetic images connected with that
pastoral festivity. He was even loose and careless in the questions he
put to Leonard about the tinker; nor did he set justice in pursuit of
that itinerant trader; for, to say truth, Richard Avenel was a man
accustomed to make enemies among the lower orders; and though he
suspected Mr. Sprott of destroying his rick, yet, when he once set about
suspecting, he found he had quite as good cause to suspect fifty other
persons. How on earth could a man puzzle himself about ricks and
tinkers, when all his cares and energies were devoted to a _dejeune
dansant_? It was a maxim of Richard Avenel's, as it ought to be of every
clever man, "to do one thing at a time;" and therefore he postponed all
other considerations till the _dejeune dansant_ was fairly done with.
Among these considerations was the letter which Leonard wished to write
to the Parson. "Wait a bit, and we will _both_ write!" said Richard
good-humoredly, "the moment the _dejeune dansant_ is over!"

It must be owned that this fete was no ordinary provincial ceremonial.
Richard Avenel was a man to do a thing well when he set about it,

"He soused the cabbage with a bounteous heart."

By little and little his first notions had expanded, till what had been
meant to be only neat and elegant now embraced the costly and
magnificent. Artificers accustomed to _dejeunes dansants_ came all the
way from London to assist, to direct, to create. Hungarian singers, and
Tyrolese singers, and Swiss peasant-women who were to chant the _Ranz
des Vaches_, and milk cows, or make syllabubs, were engaged. The great
marquee was decorated as a Gothic banquet hall; the breakfast itself was
to co