to the keen
edge of the eyes. Semble--as the lawyers say--that this idea was born of
great phonetic facts in the days when a seaman knew his duty better
than the way to spell it; and when, if his outlook were sharpened by
a friendly wring from the captain of the watch, he never dreamed of a
police court.

But Robin Lyth had never cared to ask why he wore ear-rings. His nature
was not meditative. Enough for him that all the other men of Flamborough
did so; and enough for them that their fathers had done it. Whether his
own father had done so, was more than he could say, because he knew of
no such parent; and of that other necessity, a mother, he was equally
ignorant. His first appearance at Flamborough, though it made little
stir at the moment in a place of so many adventures, might still be
considered unusual, and in some little degree remarkable. So that
Mistress Anerley was not wrong when she pressed upon Lieutenant Carroway
how unwise it might be to shoot him, any more than Carroway himself was
wrong in turning in at Anerley gate for breakfast.

This he had not done without good cause of honest and loyal necessity.
Free-trading Robin had predicted well the course of his pursuers.
Rushing eagerly up the Dike, and over its brim, with their muskets, that
gallant force of revenue men steadily scoured the neighborhood; and the
further they went, the worse they fared. There was not a horse standing
down by a pool, with his stiff legs shut up into biped form, nor a cow
staring blandly across an old rail, nor a sheep with a pectoral cough
behind a hedge, nor a rabbit making rustle at the eyebrow of his hole,
nor even a moot, that might either be a man or hold a man inside it,
whom or which those active fellows did not circumvent and poke into.
In none of these, however, could they find the smallest breach of the
strictest laws of the revenue; until at last, having exhausted their
bodies by great zeal both of themselves and of mind, they braced them
again to the duty of going, as promptly as possible, to breakfast.

For a purpose of that kind few better places, perhaps, could be found
than this Anerley Farm, though not at the best of itself just now,
because of the denials of the season. It is a sad truth about the
heyday of the year, such as August is in Yorkshire--where they have no
spring--that just when a man would like his victuals to rise to the mark
of the period, to be simple yet varied, exhilarating yet substantial