bish here."

A hoarse voice answered inaudibly.

_Maid_: "No, nor the gentleman don't want none of your stuff neither;
and how do you know there's a gentleman here at all I should like to
know? What? Don't mean no offence? I dare say. That's more than I know.
Well, that's the last word I've got to say."

In a minute more there was a knock at my door, and at the same time a
step on the gravel path under my window, and a loud hiss from the cat.
As I said "Come in" to the knock, I hastily looked out of the window,
but saw nothing. It was the maid who had knocked. She had come to ask if
there was anything I should like from the village, or anything I should
want before tea-time, because the mistress was going out, and wanted her
to go over and fetch something from the shop. I said there was nothing
except the letters and perhaps a small parcel from the post office. She
lingered a moment before going, and finally said:

"You'll excuse me naming it, sir, but there seems to be some funny
people about the roads to-day, if you'd please to be what I mean to say
a bit on the look-out, if you're not a-going out yourself."

"Certainly," I said. "No, I don't mean to go out. By the way, who was it
came to the door just now?"

"Oh, it was one of these 'awking men, not one I've seen before, and he
must be a stranger in this part, I think, because he began going round
to the garden door, only I stopped him. He'd got these cheap rubbishing
'atpins and what not; leastways, if you understand me, what I thought to
myself I shouldn't like to be seen with 'em, whatever others might."

"Yes, I see," I answered; and she went, and I turned to my books once
more.

Within a very few minutes I began to suspect that I was getting sleepy.
Yes, it was undoubtedly so. What with the warmth of the day, and lunch,
and not having been out.... There was a curious smell in the room, too,
not exactly nasty, like something burning. What did it remind me of?
Wood smoke from a cottage fire, that one smells on an autumn evening as
one comes bicycling down the hill into a village? Not quite so nice as
that; something more like a chemist's shop. I wondered: and as I
wondered, my eyes closed and my head went forward.

A sharp pain on the back of my hand, and a crash of glass! Up I jumped,
and which of three or four things I realized first I don't know now. But
I did realize in a second or two that my hand was bleeding from a
scratch all down the back of it,