kets.

"A tinker?" he cried--"that's a vagrant; and I'm a magistrate, and I've
a great mind to send you to the treadmill--that I have. What do you do
here, I say? You have not answered my question?"

"What does I do 'ere?" said Mr. Sprott. "Vy, you had better ax my
crakter of the young gent I saw you talking with just now; he knows me!"

"What! my nephew know you?"

"W--hew," whistled the tinker, "your nephew is it, sir? I have a great
respek for your family. I have known Mrs. Fairfilt, the vasherwoman,
this many a year. I 'umbly ax your pardon." And he took off his hat this
time.

Mr. Avenel turned red and white in a breath. He growled out something
inaudible, turned on his heel, and strode off. The tinker watched him as
he had watched Leonard, and then dogged the uncle as he had dogged the
nephew. I don't presume to say that there was cause and effect in what
happened that night, but it was what is called "a curious coincidence"
that that night one of Richard Avenel's ricks was set on fire; and that
that day he called Mr. Sprott an incendiary. Mr. Sprott was a man of
very high spirit and did not forgive an insult easily. His nature was
inflammatory, and so was that of the lucifers which he always carried
about him, with his tracts and glue-pots. The next morning there was an
inquiry made for the tinker, but he had disappeared from the
neighborhood.

CHAPTER XVI.

It was a fortunate thing that the _dejeune dansant_ so absorbed Mr.
Richard Avenel's thoughts, that even the conflagration of his rick could
not scare away the graceful and poetic images connected with that
pastoral festivity. He was even loose and careless in the questions he
put to Leonard about the tinker; nor did he set justice in pursuit of
that itinerant trader; for, to say truth, Richard Avenel was a man
accustomed to make enemies amongst the lower orders; and though he
suspected Mr. Sprott of destroying his rick, yet, when he once set about
suspecting, he found that he had quite as good cause to suspect fifty
other persons. How on earth could a man puzzle himself about ricks and
tinkers, when all his cares and energies were devoted to a _dejeune
dansant_? It was a maxim of Richard Avenel's, as it ought to be of
every clever man, "to do one thing at a time;" and therefore he
postponed all other considerations till the _dejeune dansant_ was fairly
done with. Amongst these considerations was the letter which Leonard
wished to write to the pars