ready, as a maiden is to blush, when she expects her sweetheart’s name. With all my experience, I could scarcely have believed it; what a change since Saturday! But ‘live and learn’ is the gardener’s rule. Galande, the best peach of all, in my opinion, is not yet ripe; but Grosse Mignonne is, and though rather woolly in a year like ’57, it is first-rate in a cool season. Observe the red spots near the caudal cavity—why bless my heart, Rasp, I meant that for your wife!”
“My wife has a very sad toothache to-day, and she would never forgive me if I made it worse. But what wonderful things they are to run!”
This baker had a gentle streak of juice in either runnel of his chin, which was shaped like a well-fed fleur-de-lis; and he wiped it all dry with the face of the bag, upon which his own name was printed.
“I knows a good thing, when I sees it; and that’s more than a woman in a hundred does. Don’t believe they can taste, or at least very few of them. Why, they’d sooner have tea than a glass of good beer! Howsoever, that’s nought to do with business. Mr. Orchardson, what’s your lowest figure? With a wall of fruit coming on like them, sixpence apiece and some thousands of them, you mustn’t be hard on a neighbour.”
My Uncle sat down on his four-legged stool (which had bars across the feet, for fear of sinking, when the ground was spongy), and he pulled his bag of vamp-leather to the middle of his waistcoat, and felt for a shred and a nail. He had learned that it never ends in satisfaction, if a man grows excited in view of a bargain, or even shows any desire to deal. Then he put up his elbow, and tapped the nail in, without hitting it hard, as the ignorant do.
“Come, I’ll make a fair offer,” the baker exclaimed, for he never let business do justice to itself; “an offer that you might call handsome, if you was looking at it in a large point of view. I’ll take fifty bushels at fifteen pence, pick ’em over myself, for the pigs and the men; and if any crusty people turn up, why here I am!”
“Rasp, you make a very great mistake,” said my Uncle, turning round upon his stool, and confronting him with strong honesty, “if you suppose that I have anything to do with the use you make of my potatoes. I sell you my goods for the utmost I can get, and you take good care that it is very little. What you do with them afterwards is no concern of mine. I owe you no thanks, and you know me not from Adam the moment you have paid me. This is the doctrine of free-trade—you recognize everything, except men.”
“Tell you what it is,” replied the baker; “sooner than vex you, Mr. Orchardson, I’ll give sixteen pence all round, just as they come out of the row. Who could say fairer than that now?”
“Eighteen is the money. Not a farthing under. From all that I can hear, it will be twenty pence to-morrow. Why, here’s another fine peach fit to come! I shall send it to your wife, and tell her you ate hers.”
The gardener merrily nailed away, while the baker was working his hands for nothing. “You would never do such a thing as that,” he said; “a single man have no call to understand a woman; but he knows what their nature is, or why did he avoid them? My wife is as good a woman as can be; but none of them was ever known to be quite perfect. If it must be eighteen, it must—and I’ll take fifty.”
“Ah, couldn’t I tell you a bit of news?” said the baker, as he counted out the money. “You are such a silent man, Mr. Orchardson, that a man of the world is afraid of you. And the young fellow, your own nevvy—well, he may take after you in speech, but not about the ladies—ah, you never would believe it!”
“Well, then, keep it to yourself, that’s all. I don’t want to hear a word against young Kit. And what’s more—if I heard fifty, I wouldn’t believe one of them.”
“No more wouldn’t I. He’s as steady a young fellow as ever drove a tax-cart. And so quiet in his manners, why, you wouldn’t think that butter—”
“His mother was a lady of birth and breeding. That’s where he gets his manners from; though there’s plenty in our family for folk that deserve them. Out with your news, man, whatever it is.”
“Well, it don’t go again him much,” the baker replied, with some fear—for my Uncle’s face was stern, and the wall-hammer swung in his brown right hand; “and indeed you might take it the other way, if he had done it all on his road home from church. You know the bridge over the Halliford brook, or at least where it was, for it’s all washed away, as you heard very likely this morning. What right had your nevvy there, going on for dark?”
My Uncle was a rather large-minded man; but without being loose, or superior. “Rasp, if it comes to that,” he said, “what right have you and I to be anywhere?”
“That’s neither here nor there,” answered the baker, having always been a man of business; “but wherever I go, I pay my way. However, your Kit was down there, and no mistake. What you think he done? He punched Sam Henderson’s head to begin with, for fear of him giving any help, and then he jumped into the water, that was coming like a house on fire from Tim Osborne’s dam, and out of it he pulled Mother Marker, and the pretty young lady as had been in church.”
“Kit can swim,” said my Uncle shortly. “It is a very dangerous trick to learn, being bound to jump in, whenever any one is drowning. Did the women go in, for him to pull them out?”
“Ah, you never did think much of them, Mr. Corny; but you never had no inskin experience. Take ’em all round, they are pretty nigh as good as we are. But they never jumped in—no, you mustn’t say that. They were bound to go home, and they were doing of it, till the flood took their legs from under them. Mrs. Marker have been, this very morning, conversing along of my good missus, and was likely to stop when I was forced to come away, and you should hear her go on about your Kit! And nobody knows if she has any friends. I am told when her time comes to go to heaven, she will have the disposal of four hundred pounds.”
“You be off to your wife!” cried Uncle Corny; “Mrs. Marker is quite a young woman yet, but old enough to have discovered what men are. Go to your work, Rasp. I hate all gossip. But I am glad that Kit thrashed Sam Henderson.”
CHAPTER V.
A LITTLE TIFF.
Everybody knows, as he reads his newspaper, that nothing has ever yet happened in the world with enough of precision and accuracy to get itself described, by those who saw it, in the same, or in even a similar manner. No wonder then that my little adventure—if I have any right to call it mine—presented itself in many different lights, not only to the people among whom it spread, but even to the few who were present there and then. Mrs. Jenny Marker’s account of what had happened was already very grand that Sunday eve; but as soon as she had slept and dreamed upon it, her great command of words proved unequal to the call made at the same moment by the mind and heart. Everybody listened, for her practice was to pay every little bill upon a Monday morning; and almost everybody was convinced that she was right.
“Miraculous is the only word that I can think of,” she said to Mrs. Cutthumb, who sold tin-tacks and cabbages; “not a miracle only of the sandy desert, but of the places where the trees and waters grow.”
“The Jordan perhaps you means, Mrs. Marker, ma’am? Or did you please to have in your mind the Red Sea?”
“They were both in my mind, and both come uppermost at the same moment, Mrs. Cutthumb. But the best authorities inform us now that we must not look for more than we can understand. Yet I cannot understand how Kit Orchardson contrived after pulling me out to pull out our Miss Kitty. But look, here he comes! Why, he is everywhere almost. He seems to swing along so. His uncle ought to work him harder. Not that he is impudent. No one can say that of him. Too bashful for a man, in my opinion. But he seems to have taken such a liking to me; and I must be his senior by a considerable time. I will go into your parlour, my dear Mrs. Cutthumb, and then I can look out for our poor Miss Kitty—ah, she is so very young, and no one to stand up for her!”
“Excuse