and most of
all your kindness to men whom you never saw before; which is an utterly
illegal thing. It also explains your toleration of these outlaw Doones
so long. If your views of law had been correct, and law an element of
your lives, these robbers could never have been indulged for so many
years amongst you: but you must have abated the nuisance.'

'Now, Stickles,' I cried, 'this is too bad!' he was delivering himself
so grandly. 'Why you yourself have been amongst us, as the balance, and
sceptre, and sword of law, for nigh upon a twelvemonth; and have you
abated the nuisance, or even cared to do it, until they began to shoot
at you?'

'My son,' he replied, 'your argument is quite beside the purpose, and
only tends to prove more clearly that which I have said of you. However,
if you wish to hear my story, no more interruptions. I may not have a
chance to tell you, perhaps for weeks, or I know not when, if once those
yellows and reds arrive, and be blessed to them, the lubbers! Well,
it may be six months ago, or it may be seven, at any rate a good while
before that cursed frost began, the mere name of which sends a shiver
down every bone of my body, when I was riding one afternoon from
Dulverton to Watchett'--

'Dulverton to Watchett!' I cried. 'Now what does that remind me of? I am
sure, I remember something--'

'Remember this, John, if anything--that another word from thee, and thou
hast no more of mine. Well, I was a little weary perhaps, having been
plagued at Dulverton with the grossness of the people. For they would
tell me nothing at all about their fellow-townsmen, your worthy Uncle
Huckaback, except that he was a God-fearing man, and they only wished
I was like him. I blessed myself for a stupid fool, in thinking to have
pumped them; for by this time I might have known that, through your
Western homeliness, every man in his own country is something more than
a prophet. And I felt, of course, that I had done more harm than good by
questioning; inasmuch as every soul in the place would run straightway
and inform him that the King's man from the other side of the forest had
been sifting out his ways and works.'

'Ah,' I cried, for I could not help it; 'you begin to understand at
last, that we are not quite such a set of oafs, as you at first believed
us.'

'I was riding on from Dulverton,' he resumed, with great severity, yet
threatening me no more, which checked me more than fifty threats: 'and
it was l