_patois_.

"Countrymen," he explained, as he attended Vendale to the door. "Poor
compatriots. Grateful and attached, like dogs! Good-bye. To meet
again. So glad!"

Two more light touches on his elbows dismissed him into the street.

Sweet Marguerite at her frame, and Madame Dor's broad back at her
telegraph, floated before him to Cripple Corner. On his arrival there,
Wilding was closeted with Bintrey. The cellar doors happening to be
open, Vendale lighted a candle in a cleft stick, and went down for a
cellarous stroll. Graceful Marguerite floated before him faithfully, but
Madame Dor's broad back remained outside.

The vaults were very spacious, and very old. There had been a stone
crypt down there, when bygones were not bygones; some said, part of a
monkish refectory; some said, of a chapel; some said, of a Pagan temple.
It was all one now. Let who would make what he liked of a crumbled
pillar and a broken arch or so. Old Time had made what _he_ liked of it,
and was quite indifferent to contradiction.

The close air, the musty smell, and the thunderous rumbling in the
streets above, as being, out of the routine of ordinary life, went well
enough with the picture of pretty Marguerite holding her own against
those two. So Vendale went on until, at a turning in the vaults, he saw
a light like the light he carried.

"O! You are here, are you, Joey?"

"Oughtn't it rather to go, 'O! _You're_ here, are you, Master George?'
For it's my business to be here. But it ain't yourn."

"Don't grumble, Joey."

"O! _I_ don't grumble," returned the Cellarman. "If anything grumbles,
it's what I've took in through the pores; it ain't me. Have a care as
something in you don't begin a grumbling, Master George. Stop here long
enough for the wapours to work, and they'll be at it."

His present occupation consisted of poking his head into the bins, making
measurements and mental calculations, and entering them in a rhinoceros-
hide-looking note-book, like a piece of himself.

"They'll be at it," he resumed, laying the wooden rod that he measured
with across two casks, entering his last calculation, and straightening
his back, "trust 'em! And so you've regularly come into the business,
Master George?"

"Regularly. I hope you don't object, Joey?"

"_I_ don't, bless you. But Wapours objects that you're too young. You're
both on you too young."

"We shall got over that objection day by day, Joey."

"Ay, Ma