colour to look at that the
men of round-abouts and wax-work shows seemed gentlemen beside him;
but he considered them low company, and remained aloof. Among all
these squatters and folks of the road the reddleman continually found
himself; yet he was not of them. His occupation tended to isolate
him, and isolated he was mostly seen to be.

It was sometimes suggested that reddlemen were criminals for whose
misdeeds other men had wrongfully suffered: that in escaping the law
they had not escaped their own consciences, and had taken to the trade
as a lifelong penance. Else why should they have chosen it? In the
present case such a question would have been particularly apposite.
The reddleman who had entered Egdon that afternoon was an instance of
the pleasing being wasted to form the ground-work of the singular,
when an ugly foundation would have done just as well for that purpose.
The one point that was forbidding about this reddleman was his colour.
Freed from that he would have been as agreeable a specimen of rustic
manhood as one would often see. A keen observer might have been
inclined to think--which was, indeed, partly the truth--that he had
relinquished his proper station in life for want of interest in it.
Moreover, after looking at him one would have hazarded the guess
that good-nature, and an acuteness as extreme as it could be without
verging on craft, formed the frame-work of his character.

While he darned the stocking his face became rigid with thought.
Softer expressions followed this, and then again recurred the tender
sadness which had sat upon him during his drive along the highway that
afternoon. Presently his needle stopped. He laid down the stocking,
arose from his seat, and took a leather pouch from a hook in the
corner of the van. This contained among other articles a brown-paper
packet, which, to judge from the hinge-like character of its worn
folds, seemed to have been carefully opened and closed a good many
times. He sat down on a three-legged milking stool that formed the
only seat in the van, and, examining his packet by the light of a
candle, took thence an old letter and spread it open. The writing had
originally been traced on white paper, but the letter had now assumed
a pale red tinge from the accident of its situation; and the black
strokes of writing thereon looked like the twigs of a winter hedge
against a vermilion sunset. The letter bore a date some two years
previous to that time,