cts and glue-pots.

The next morning there was an inquiry made for the tinker, but he had
disappeared from the neighbourhood.

CHAPTER XVI.

It was a fortunate thing that the dejeune dansant so absorbed Mr.
Richard Avenel's thoughts that even the conflagration of his rick
could not scare away the graceful and poetic images connected with that
pastoral festivity. He was even loose and careless in the questions he
put to Leonard about the tinker; nor did he send justice in pursuit
of that itinerant trader; for, to say truth, Richard Avenel was a man
accustomed to make enemies amongst the lower orders; and though he
suspected Mr. Sprott of destroying his rick, yet, when he once set about
suspecting, he found he had quite as good cause to suspect fifty other
persons. How on earth could a man puzzle himself about ricks and tinkers
when all his cares and energies were devoted to a dejeune dansant? It
was a maxim of Richard Avenel's, as it ought to be of every clever
man, "to do one thing at a time;" and therefore he postponed all other
considerations till the dejeune dansant was fairly done with. Amongst
these considerations was the letter which Leonard wished to write to
the parson. "Wait a bit, and we will both write!" said Richard,
good-humouredly, "the moment the dijeune dansant is over!"

It must be owned that this fete was no ordinary provincial ceremonial.
Richard Avenel was a man to do a thing well when he set about it,--

"He soused the cabbage with a bounteous heart."

By little and little his first notions had expanded, till what had
been meant to be only neat and elegant now embraced the costly and
magnificent. Artificers accustomed to dejeunes dansants came all the
way from London to assist, to direct, to create. Hungarian singers and
Tyrolese singers and Swiss peasant-women, who were to chant the Ranz des
Vaches, and milk cows or make syllabubs, were engaged. The great marquee
was decorated as a Gothic banquet-hall; the breakfast itself was to
consist of "all the delicacies of the season." In short, as Richard
Avenel said to himself, "It is a thing once in a way; a thing on which I
don't object to spend money, provided that the thing is--the thing!"

It had been a matter of grave meditation how to make the society
worthy of the revel; for Richard Avenel was not contented with the mere
aristocracy of the town,--his ambition had grown with his expenses.
"Since it will cost so much," said he, "I m