thered here; though it must be admitted that
the lowest fringe of the Mariner's party touched the crest of Peter's at
points. Waifs and strays of all sorts loitered about here. The landlady
was a virtuous woman who years ago had been unjustly sent to gaol as
an accessory to something or other after the fact. She underwent her
twelvemonth, and had worn a martyr's countenance ever since, except at
times of meeting the constable who apprehended her, when she winked her
eye.

To this house Jopp and his acquaintances had arrived. The settles on
which they sat down were thin and tall, their tops being guyed by pieces
of twine to hooks in the ceiling; for when the guests grew boisterous
the settles would rock and overturn without some such security. The
thunder of bowls echoed from the backyard; swingels hung behind the
blower of the chimney; and ex-poachers and ex-gamekeepers, whom squires
had persecuted without a cause, sat elbowing each other--men who in past
times had met in fights under the moon, till lapse of sentences on the
one part, and loss of favour and expulsion from service on the other,
brought them here together to a common level, where they sat calmly
discussing old times.

"Dost mind how you could jerk a trout ashore with a bramble, and not
ruffle the stream, Charl?" a deposed keeper was saying. "'Twas at that I
caught 'ee once, if you can mind?"

"That I can. But the worst larry for me was that pheasant business
at Yalbury Wood. Your wife swore false that time, Joe--O, by Gad, she
did--there's no denying it."

"How was that?" asked Jopp.

"Why--Joe closed wi' me, and we rolled down together, close to his
garden hedge. Hearing the noise, out ran his wife with the oven pyle,
and it being dark under the trees she couldn't see which was uppermost.
'Where beest thee, Joe, under or top?' she screeched. 'O--under, by
Gad!' says he. She then began to rap down upon my skull, back, and ribs
with the pyle till we'd roll over again. 'Where beest now, dear Joe,
under or top?' she'd scream again. By George, 'twas through her I was
took! And then when we got up in hall she sware that the cock pheasant
was one of her rearing, when 'twas not your bird at all, Joe; 'twas
Squire Brown's bird--that's whose 'twas--one that we'd picked off as
we passed his wood, an hour afore. It did hurt my feelings to be so
wronged!... Ah well--'tis over now."

"I might have had 'ee days afore that," said the keeper. "I was within
a few