n his power to
procure an order to taste wine at the Docks, where you may get as much
wine as you like out of big sixpenny glasses, and try cask after cask,
walking down gas-lit paths between the huge bellies of wine which groan
to be tapped and tried, that men may know them. The idea of paying
two shillings and sixpence for one miserable bottle vanished at the
richly-coloured prospect. "That'll show him something of what London
is," thought Anthony; and a companion thought told him in addition
that the farmer, with a skinful of wine, would emerge into the open
air imagining no small things of the man who could gain admittance into
those marvellous caverns. "By George! it's like a boy's story-book,"
cried Anthony, in his soul, and he chuckled over the vision of the
farmer's amazement--acted it with his arms extended, and his hat
unseated, and plunged into wheezy fits of laughter.

He met his guests at the station. Mr. Fleming was soberly attired in
what, to Anthony's London eye, was a curiosity costume; but the broad
brim of the hat, the square cut of the brown coat, and the leggings,
struck him as being very respectable, and worthy of a presentation at
any Bank in London.

"You stick to a leather purse, brother William John?" he inquired, with
an artistic sentiment for things in keeping.

"I do," said the farmer, feeling seriously at the button over it.

"All right; I shan't ask ye to show it in the street," Anthony rejoined,
and smote Rhoda's hand as it hung.

"Glad to see your old uncle--are ye?"

Rhoda replied quietly that she was, but had come with the principal
object of seeing her sister.

"There!" cried Anthony, "you never get a compliment out of this gal.
She gives ye the nut, and you're to crack it, and there maybe, or there
mayn't be, a kernel inside--she don't care."

"But there ain't much in it!" the farmer ejaculated, withdrawing
his fingers from the button they had been teasing for security since
Anthony's question about the purse.

"Not much--eh! brother William John?" Anthony threw up a puzzled look.
"Not much baggage--I see that--" he exclaimed; "and, Lord be thanked! no
trunks. Aha, my dear"--he turned to Rhoda--"you remember your lesson,
do ye? Now, mark me--I'll remember you for it. Do you know, my dear," he
said to Rhoda confidentially, "that sixpenn'orth of chaff which I made
the cabman pay for--there was the cream of it!--that was better than
Peruvian bark to my constitution. It was as