he saw Leonard
accosted by a gentleman of comely mien and important swagger. That
gentleman soon left the young man, and came, whistling loud, up the
path, and straight towards the tinker. Mr. Sprott looked round, but the
hedge was too neat to allow of a good hiding-place, so he put a bold
front on it, and stepped forth like a man. But, alas for him! before he
got into the public path, the proprietor of the land, Mr. Richard
Avenel (for the gentleman was no less a personage), had spied out the
trespasser, and called to him with a "Hillo, fellow," that bespoke all
the dignity of a man who owns acres, and all the wrath of a man who
beholds those acres impudently invaded.

The tinker stopped, and Mr. Avenel stalked up to him. "What the devil
are you doing on my property, lurking by my hedge? I suspect you are an
incendiary!"

"I be a tinker," quoth Mr. Sprott, not louting low, for a sturdy
republican was Mr. Sprott, but, like a lord of human kind,--

"Pride in his port, defiance in his eye."

Mr. Avenel's fingers itched to knock the tinker's villanous hat off his
jacobinical head, but he repressed the undignified impulse by thrusting
both hands deep into his trousers' pockets.

"A tinker!" he cried,--"that's a vagrant; and I'm a magistrate, and I've
a great mind to send you to the treadmill,--that I have. What do you do
here, I say? You have not answered my question."

"What does I do 'ere?" said Mr. Sprott. "Vy, you had better ax my
crakter of the young gent I saw you talking with just now; he knows me."

"What! my nephew knows you?"

"W-hew," whistled the tinker, "your nephew is it, sir? I have a great
respek for your family. I 've knowed Mrs. Fairfilt the vashervoman this
many a year. I 'umbly ax your pardon." And he took off his hat this
time.

Mr. Avenel turned red and white in a breath. He growled out something
inaudible, turned on his heel, and strode off. The tinker watched him as
he had watched Leonard, and then dogged the uncle as he had dogged the
nephew. I don't presume to say that there was cause and effect in what
happened that night, but it was what is called "a curious coincidence"
that that night one of Richard Avenel's ricks was set on fire, and that
that day he had called Mr. Sprott an incendiary. Mr. Sprott was a man of
a very high spirit, and did not forgive an insult easily. His nature was
inflammatory, and so was that of the lucifers which he always carried
about him, with his tra