itting forward.

"'Tis Barber Percombe--he that's got the waxen woman in his window at
the top of Abbey Street," said one. "What business can bring him from
his shop out here at this time and not a journeyman hair-cutter, but a
master-barber that's left off his pole because 'tis not genteel!"

They listened to his conversation, but Mr. Percombe, though he had
nodded and spoken genially, seemed indisposed to gratify the curiosity
which he had aroused; and the unrestrained flow of ideas which had
animated the inside of the van before his arrival was checked
thenceforward.

Thus they rode on till they turned into a half-invisible little lane,
whence, as it reached the verge of an eminence, could be discerned in
the dusk, about half a mile to the right, gardens and orchards sunk in
a concave, and, as it were, snipped out of the woodland. From this
self-contained place rose in stealthy silence tall stems of smoke,
which the eye of imagination could trace downward to their root on
quiet hearth-stones festooned overhead with hams and flitches. It was
one of those sequestered spots outside the gates of the world where may
usually be found more meditation than action, and more passivity than
meditation; where reasoning proceeds on narrow premises, and results in
inferences wildly imaginative; yet where, from time to time, no less
than in other places, dramas of a grandeur and unity truly Sophoclean
are enacted in the real, by virtue of the concentrated passions and
closely knit interdependence of the lives therein.

This place was the Little Hintock of the master-barber's search. The
coming night gradually obscured the smoke of the chimneys, but the
position of the sequestered little world could still be distinguished
by a few faint lights, winking more or less ineffectually through the
leafless boughs, and the undiscerned songsters they bore, in the form
of balls of feathers, at roost among them.

Out of the lane followed by the van branched a yet smaller lane, at the
corner of which the barber alighted, Mrs. Dollery's van going on to the
larger village, whose superiority to the despised smaller one as an
exemplar of the world's movements was not particularly apparent in its
means of approach.

"A very clever and learned young doctor, who, they say, is in league
with the devil, lives in the place you be going to--not because there's
anybody for'n to cure there, but because 'tis the middle of his
district."

The obse