He thought
he could ask better if he did not face his father, so he stopped just at
the back of the chair and said timidly:

"Father."

The vicar looked round in a sort of dream and saw the little
knickerbockered figure standing there, with a wide-mouthed, nervous
smile on its face.

"Well," he said in an absent way.

"O please, father," said Gabriel, "may Roger and I have the cart and
horse to-morrow?"

"Eh, my boy? Cart and horse--what for?"

"Why," continued Gabriel hurriedly, "to-morrow's Donnington market, and
we can't sell our pigs here, and he thought--I thought--we thought, that
we might sell them there."

He gazed breathless at his father's face, and knew by its abstracted
expression that the vicar's thoughts were very far away from any
question of pigs--as indeed they were, for they were busy with the
subject of the pamphlet he had been reading.

"Foolish boys, foolish boys," he said, "do as you like."

"Then we may have it, father?"

"Do as you like, do as you like. Don't trouble, there's a good boy;"
and he turned round to the fire again without having half realised the
situation.

But Roger and Gabriel realised it fully, and the next morning between
five and six o'clock, while it was still all grey, and cold, and misty,
they set forth triumphantly on their way to market with the pigs
carefully netted over in the cart. Through the lanes, strewn thickly
with the brown and yellow leaves of late autumn, up the steep chalk hill
and over the bare bleak downs, the old horse pounded steadily along with
the two grave little boys and their squeaking black companions.

There was not much conversation on the road, for, although Gabriel was
an excitable and talkative boy, he was now so fully impressed by the
importance of the undertaking that he was unusually silent, and Roger
was naturally rather quiet and deliberate.

They had to drive between five and six miles to Donnington, and at last,
as they wound slowly down a long hill, they saw the town and the
cathedral towers lying at their feet.

They were a good deal too early, for in their excitement they had
started much too soon.

"But that is all the better," said Roger, "because we shall get a good
place."

Presently the pen, made of four hurdles, was ready, the pigs safely in
it, and the boys took their station in front of it and waited events.

Donnington market was a large one, well attended by all the fanners for
miles round; gradually