and the browning of the sausages
got the better of me.

[Illustration: 072.jpg John Ridd at Supper]

But nobody could get out of me where I had been all the day and evening;
although they worried me never so much, and longed to shake me to
pieces, especially Betty Muxworthy, who never could learn to let well
alone. Not that they made me tell any lies, although it would have
served them right almost for intruding on other people's business; but
that I just held my tongue, and ate my supper rarely, and let them try
their taunts and jibes, and drove them almost wild after supper, by
smiling exceeding knowingly. And indeed I could have told them things,
as I hinted once or twice; and then poor Betty and our little Lizzie
were so mad with eagerness, that between them I went into the fire,
being thoroughly overcome with laughter and my own importance.

Now what the working of my mind was (if, indeed it worked at all, and
did not rather follow suit of body) it is not in my power to say; only
that the result of my adventure in the Doone Glen was to make me dream
a good deal of nights, which I had never done much before, and to drive
me, with tenfold zeal and purpose, to the practice of bullet-shooting.
Not that I ever expected to shoot the Doone family, one by one, or even
desired to do so, for my nature is not revengeful; but that it seemed
to be somehow my business to understand the gun, as a thing I must be at
home with.

I could hit the barn-door now capitally well with the Spanish
match-lock, and even with John Fry's blunderbuss, at ten good land-yards
distance, without any rest for my fusil. And what was very wrong of me,
though I did not see it then, I kept John Fry there, to praise my shots,
from dinner-time often until the grey dusk, while he all the time should
have been at work spring-ploughing upon the farm. And for that matter so
should I have been, or at any rate driving the horses; but John was
by no means loath to be there, instead of holding the plough-tail. And
indeed, one of our old sayings is,--

"For pleasure's sake I would liefer wet,
Than ha' ten lumps of gold for each one of my sweat."

And again, which is not a bad proverb, though unthrifty and unlike a
Scotsman's,--

"God makes the wheat grow greener,
While farmer be at his dinner."

And no Devonshire man, or Somerset either (and I belong to both of
them), ever thinks of working harder than God likes to see him.

Neve