t did the lady say then?"

"I can't mind. Please, Master Reddleman, may I go home-along now?"

"Ay, to be sure you may. I'll go a bit of ways with you."

He conducted the boy out of the gravel-pit and into the path leading
to his mother's cottage. When the little figure had vanished in the
darkness the reddleman returned, resumed his seat by the fire, and
proceeded to darn again.

IX

Love Leads a Shrewd Man into Strategy

Reddlemen of the old school are now but seldom seen. Since the
introduction of railways Wessex farmers have managed to do without
these Mephistophelian visitants, and the bright pigment so largely
used by shepherds in preparing sheep for the fair is obtained by other
routes. Even those who yet survive are losing the poetry of existence
which characterized them when the pursuit of the trade meant
periodical journeys to the pit whence the material was dug, a regular
camping out from month to month, except in the depth of winter, a
peregrination among farms which could be counted by the hundred,
and in spite of this Arab existence the preservation of that
respectability which is insured by the never-failing production of a
well-lined purse.

Reddle spreads its lively hues over everything it lights on, and
stamps unmistakably, as with the mark of Cain, any person who has
handled it half an hour.

A child's first sight of a reddleman was an epoch in his life. That
blood-coloured figure was a sublimation of all the horrid dreams
which had afflicted the juvenile spirit since imagination began. "The
reddleman is coming for you!" had been the formulated threat of Wessex
mothers for many generations. He was successfully supplanted for a
while, at the beginning of the present century, by Buonaparte; but as
process of time rendered the latter personage stale and ineffective
the older phrase resumed its early prominence. And now the reddleman
has in his turn followed Buonaparte to the land of worn-out bogeys,
and his place is filled by modern inventions.

The reddleman lived like a gipsy; but gipsies he scorned. He was
about as thriving as travelling basket and mat makers; but he had
nothing to do with them. He was more decently born and brought up
than the cattle-drovers who passed and repassed him in his wanderings;
but they merely nodded to him. His stock was more valuable than that
of pedlars; but they did not think so, and passed his cart with eyes
straight ahead. He was such an unnatural