ounted, with the aid of the block before the door, in a twinkling.

'Halloa there! Hugh!' roared John. 'I ask your pardon, sir, for keeping
you standing in the porch; but my son has gone to town on business, and
the boy being, as I may say, of a kind of use to me, I'm rather put
out when he's away. Hugh!--a dreadful idle vagrant fellow, sir, half
a gipsy, as I think--always sleeping in the sun in summer, and in
the straw in winter time, sir--Hugh! Dear Lord, to keep a gentleman
a waiting here through him!--Hugh! I wish that chap was dead, I do
indeed.'

'Possibly he is,' returned the other. 'I should think if he were living,
he would have heard you by this time.'

'In his fits of laziness, he sleeps so desperate hard,' said the
distracted host, 'that if you were to fire off cannon-balls into his
ears, it wouldn't wake him, sir.'

The guest made no remark upon this novel cure for drowsiness, and recipe
for making people lively, but, with his hands clasped behind him, stood
in the porch, very much amused to see old John, with the bridle in his
hand, wavering between a strong impulse to abandon the animal to his
fate, and a half disposition to lead him into the house, and shut him up
in the parlour, while he waited on his master.

'Pillory the fellow, here he is at last!' cried John, in the very height
and zenith of his distress. 'Did you hear me a calling, villain?'

The figure he addressed made no answer, but putting his hand upon the
saddle, sprung into it at a bound, turned the horse's head towards the
stable, and was gone in an instant.

'Brisk enough when he is awake,' said the guest.

'Brisk enough, sir!' replied John, looking at the place where the horse
had been, as if not yet understanding quite, what had become of him. 'He
melts, I think. He goes like a drop of froth. You look at him, and there
he is. You look at him again, and--there he isn't.'

Having, in the absence of any more words, put this sudden climax to what
he had faintly intended should be a long explanation of the whole life
and character of his man, the oracular John Willet led the gentleman up
his wide dismantled staircase into the Maypole's best apartment.

It was spacious enough in all conscience, occupying the whole depth of
the house, and having at either end a great bay window, as large as many
modern rooms; in which some few panes of stained glass, emblazoned
with fragments of armorial bearings, though cracked, and patched, and
sh