round was soft, and easy to their tired feet.
As they passed behind the church, they heard voices near at hand, and
presently came on those who had spoken.

They were two men who were seated in easy attitudes upon the grass, and
so busily engaged as to be at first unconscious of intruders. It was
not difficult to divine that they were of a class of itinerant
showmen--exhibitors of the freaks of Punch--for, perched cross-legged
upon a tombstone behind them, was a figure of that hero himself, his
nose and chin as hooked and his face as beaming as usual. Perhaps his
imperturbable character was never more strikingly developed, for he
preserved his usual equable smile notwithstanding that his body was
dangling in a most uncomfortable position, all loose and limp and
shapeless, while his long peaked cap, unequally balanced against his
exceedingly slight legs, threatened every instant to bring him toppling
down.

In part scattered upon the ground at the feet of the two men, and in
part jumbled together in a long flat box, were the other persons of the
Drama. The hero's wife and one child, the hobby-horse, the doctor, the
foreign gentleman who not being familiar with the language is unable in
the representation to express his ideas otherwise than by the utterance
of the word 'Shallabalah' three distinct times, the radical neighbour
who will by no means admit that a tin bell is an organ, the
executioner, and the devil, were all here. Their owners had evidently
come to that spot to make some needful repairs in the stage
arrangements, for one of them was engaged in binding together a small
gallows with thread, while the other was intent upon fixing a new black
wig, with the aid of a small hammer and some tacks, upon the head of
the radical neighbour, who had been beaten bald.

They raised their eyes when the old man and his young companion were
close upon them, and pausing in their work, returned their looks of
curiosity. One of them, the actual exhibitor no doubt, was a little
merry-faced man with a twinkling eye and a red nose, who seemed to have
unconsciously imbibed something of his hero's character. The
other--that was he who took the money--had rather a careful and
cautious look, which was perhaps inseparable from his occupation also.

The merry man was the first to greet the strangers with a nod; and
following the old man's eyes, he observed that perhaps that was the
first time he had ever seen a Punch off the sta