persistence in our story, and astounded by our want of respect, the
defection of his follower utterly cowed him. After staring wildly
about him for a moment, he fairly turned tail, and sat down on an old
box by the door, where with his hands on his knees, he looked out
before him with such an expression of chap-fallen bewilderment as
nearly discovered our plot by throwing us into fits of laughter.

Still he was not persuaded; for, from time to time, he roused himself,
and lifting his head cast suspicious glances at our party. But the two
strollers, who were now in their element, played their parts with so
much craft and delicacy, and with such an infinity of humour besides,
that everything he overheard plunged him deeper in the slough. They
knew something of local affairs, and called one another Mayor very
naturally; and mentioning their wives, let drop other scraps of
information that, catching his ear, made the wretched man every now and
then sit up as if a wasp had stung him. One story in particular which
the false Mayor told--and which, it appeared, was to the knowledge of
all the country round the real Mayor's stock anecdote--had an absurd
effect upon him. He straightened himself, listened as if his life
depended upon it, and when he heard the well-known ending, uttered,
doubtless, in something of his old tone, he collapsed into himself like
a man who had no longer faith in anything.

Presently, however, an effort of common-sense would again disperse the
fog. He would raise his head, his eye grow bright, something of his
old pugnacity would come back to him. He would appear--this more than
once--to be on the point of rising to challenge us. But these
occasions were as skilfully met as they were easily detected; and as
the rogues had invariably some stroke in reserve that in a twinkling
flung him back into his old state of dazed bewilderment, while it
well-nigh killed us with stifled mirth, they only gave ever new point
to the jest.

This, to be brief, was carried on until I retired; and probably the two
strollers would have kept it up longer if the ludicrous doubt whether
he was himself, which they had lodged in the Mayor's mind, had not at
last spurred him to action. An hour before midnight, feeling it rankle
intolerably, I suppose, he sprang up on a sudden, dragged the door
open, darted out with the air of a madman, and in a moment was lost in
the darkness of the moor.

When I rose in the morning, th