CHAPTER IX.

In the cool of the evening Dr. Riccabocca walked home across the fields.
Mr. and Mrs. Dale had accompanied him half-way, and as they now turned
back to the parsonage, they looked behind to catch a glimpse of the
tall, outlandish figure, winding slowly through the path amidst the
waves of the green corn.

"Poor man!" said Mrs. Dale, feelingly; "and the button was off his
wristband! What a pity he has nobody to take care of him! He seems very
domestic. Don't you think, Charles, it would be a great blessing if we
could get him a good wife?"

"Um," said the parson; "I doubt if he values the married state as he
ought."

"What do you mean, Charles? I never saw a man more polite to ladies in
my life."

"Yes, but--"

"But what? You are always so mysterious, Charles dear."

"Mysterious! No, Carry; but if you could hear what the doctor says of
the ladies sometimes."

"Ay, when you men get together, my dear. I know what that means--pretty
things you say of us! But you are all alike; you know you are, love!"

"I am sure," said the parson, simply, "that I have good cause to speak
well of the sex--when I think of you and my poor mother."

Mrs. Dale, who, with all her "tempers," was an excellent woman, and
loved her husband with the whole of her quick little heart, was touched.
She pressed his hand, and did not call him dear all the way home.

Meanwhile the Italian passed the fields, and came upon the high road
about two miles from Hazeldean. On one side stood an old-fashioned
solitary inn, such as English inns used to be before they became
railway hotels,--square, solid, old-fashioned, looking so hospitable
and comfortable, with their great signs swinging from some elm-tree in
front, and the long row of stables standing a little back, with a chaise
or two in the yard, and the jolly landlord talking of the crops to some
stout farmer, whose rough pony halts of itself at the well-known door.
Opposite this inn, on the other side of the road, stood the habitation
of Dr. Riecabocca.

A few years before the date of these annals, the stage-coach on its way
to London from a seaport town stopped at the inn, as was its wont, for a
good hour, that its passengers might dine like Christian Englishmen--not
gulp down a basin of scalding soup, like everlasting heathen Yankees,
with that cursed railway-whistle shrieking like a fiend in their ears!
It was the best dining-place on the whole road, for the trout in the