in those days: but Tregarrick (Polpeor's
nearest market town) boasted a Horticultural Society and an annual
Exhibition. Whether from indolence or modesty Doctor Unonius never
competed, but he seldom missed to visit the show and to con the
exhibits. The date was then, and is to this day, the Feast of St
Matthew, which falls on the twenty-first of September: and one year,
on the morrow of St Matthew's Feast, the doctor, gazing pensively
over his orchard gate at a noble tree of fruit, remarked to his
friend and next-door neighbour, Captain Minards, late of the merchant
service--

'Do you know, Minards, I was at Tregarrick yesterday; and I think--
yes, without vaunting, I really think that the best of my pearmains
yonder would have stood a fair chance of the prize for Table
Varieties.'

'The prize?' grunted Captain Minards. 'Don't you fret about that:
you won it all right.'

'Eh?' queried Doctor Unonius, wiping his spectacles.

'Ay,' said Captain Minards, filling a pipe; 'you won it, right
enough.'

'But--'

'There's no "but" about it. And what vexes me,' pursued Captain
Minards, 'is that the rascals don't even trouble to rob you neatly.
See that branch broken, yonder.'

'That's with the weight of the crop.'

'Weight o' my fiddlestick! And the ground all strewed with short
twigs!'

'The wind's doing.'

'When you know the weather has been flat calm for a week past!'

'There's an extraordinary eddy just here, at the turn of the valley;
I have often observed a puff of wind--you might almost call it a
gust--spring up with no apparent reason.'

'Well, you're a man of science,' Captain Minards replied doggedly,
'and if you tell me this puff o' wind carried your pearmains all the
way to Tregarrick and entered 'em at the show under some other body's
name, I'm bound to believe you. But I wonder you don't put it into a
book. It's interestin' enough.'

With this Parthian shot he departed. But two nights later he was
awakened in his bedroom, which overlooked the doctor's orchard, by a
strange rustling among the apple trees. _Thud--thud!_--there as he
lay he listened for half a minute to the sounds of the dropping
fruit.

The night was calm. . . . On the wall facing the bed's foot there
hung an old gun. Captain Minards arose, reached it down, loaded it
with a charge of powder, and, stepping to the window, let bang at the
trees. . . . After listening awhile he replaced the gun and retired
to rest.

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