disappear, and there instead, talking
glibly to us from first to last just as the case might happen to be, was
either the patterer on the cart footboard or honest Cobbs touching
his hair with a bootjack. His very first words not only lead up to
his confidences, but in the same breath struck the key-note of his
character. "Where had he been? Lord, everywhere! What had he been? Bless
you, everything a'most. Seen a good deal? Why, of course he had. Would
be easier for him to tell what he hadn't seen than what he had. Ah! A
deal, it would. What was the curiosest thing he'd seen? Well! He didn't
know--couldn't name it momently--unless it was a Unicorn, and he see
_him_ over at a Fair. But"--and here came the golden retrospect, a fairy
tale of love told by a tavern Boots, and told all through, moreover, as
none but a Boots could tell it--"Supposing a young gentleman not eight
year'old, was to run away with a fine young woman of seven, might I
think _that_ a queer start? Certainly! Then, that was a start as he
himself had had his blessed eyes on--and he'd cleaned the shoes they
run away in--and they was so little he couldn't get his hand into 'em."
Whereupon, following up the thread of his discourse, Boots would take
his crowd of hearers, quite willingly on their part, into the heart of
the charming labyrinth.

The descriptive powers of Cobbs, it will be admitted, were for one thing
very remarkable. Master Harry Walmers' father, for instance, he hits off
to a nicety in a phrase or two. "He was a gentleman of spirit, and good
looking, and held his head up when he walked, and had what you may call
Fire about him:" adding, that he wrote poetry, rode, ran, cricketed,
danced and acted, and "done it all equally beautiful." Another and
a very significant touch, by the way, was imparted to that same
portraiture later on, just, in point of fact before the close of Cobbs's
reminiscence, and one so lightly given that it was conveyed through a
mere passing parenthesis--namely, where the young father was described
by Boots as standing beside Master Harry Walmers' bed, in the Holly Tree
Inn, looking down at the little sleeping face, "looking wonderfully
like it," says Cobbs, who adds, "(they do say as he ran away with Mrs.
Walmers)." Although Boots described Master Harry's father from the
first as "uncommon proud of him, as his only child, you see," the worthy
fellow took especial care at once to add, that "he didn't spoil him
neither." Ha