ather the reverse, indeed. At last he entered the bakehouse,
and found there Robert Creedle sitting over the embers, also lost in
contemplation. Winterborne sat down beside him.

"Well, Robert, you must be tired. You'd better get on to bed."

"Ay, ay, Giles--what do I call ye? Maister, I would say. But 'tis well
to think the day IS done, when 'tis done."

Winterborne had abstractedly taken the poker, and with a wrinkled
forehead was ploughing abroad the wood-embers on the broad hearth, till
it was like a vast scorching Sahara, with red-hot bowlders lying about
everywhere. "Do you think it went off well, Creedle?" he asked.

"The victuals did; that I know. And the drink did; that I steadfastly
believe, from the holler sound of the barrels. Good, honest drink
'twere, the headiest mead I ever brewed; and the best wine that berries
could rise to; and the briskest Horner-and-Cleeves cider ever wrung
down, leaving out the spice and sperrits I put into it, while that
egg-flip would ha' passed through muslin, so little curdled 'twere.
'Twas good enough to make any king's heart merry--ay, to make his whole
carcass smile. Still, I don't deny I'm afeared some things didn't go
well with He and his." Creedle nodded in a direction which signified
where the Melburys lived.

"I'm afraid, too, that it was a failure there!"

"If so, 'twere doomed to be so. Not but what that snail might as well
have come upon anybody else's plate as hers."

"What snail?"

"Well, maister, there was a little one upon the edge of her plate when
I brought it out; and so it must have been in her few leaves of
wintergreen."

"How the deuce did a snail get there?"

"That I don't know no more than the dead; but there my gentleman was."

"But, Robert, of all places, that was where he shouldn't have been!"

"Well, 'twas his native home, come to that; and where else could we
expect him to be? I don't care who the man is, snails and caterpillars
always will lurk in close to the stump of cabbages in that tantalizing
way."

"He wasn't alive, I suppose?" said Giles, with a shudder on Grace's
account.

"Oh no. He was well boiled. I warrant him well boiled. God forbid
that a LIVE snail should be seed on any plate of victuals that's served
by Robert Creedle....But Lord, there; I don't mind 'em myself--them
small ones, for they were born on cabbage, and they've lived on
cabbage, so they must be made of cabbage. But she, the close-mouthed
littl