"And he has given it too, has John." "Nay, nay, John's doon--ey, ey, he's doon, is John." One of the wrestlers had thrown the other, and was standing quietly over him. He was a stalwart young man of eight-and-twenty, brown-haired, clear-eyed, of a ruddy complexion, with a short, thick, curly beard, and the grace and bearing that comes of health and strength and a complete absence of self-consciousness. He smiled cheerfully, and nodded his head in response to loud shouts of applause. "Weel done! Verra weel done! That's the way to ding 'em ower! What sayst tha, Reuben?" "What a bash it was, to be sure!" "What dusta think you of yon wrestling, ey, man?" "Nay, nay, it's verra middling." "Ever seen owt like it since the good auld days you crack on sa often, auld man?" "Nay, he doont him verra neat, did Paul--I will allow it." "There's never a man in Cumberland need take a hand with young Paul Ritson after this." "Ey, ey; he's his father's son." The wrestler, surrounded by a little multitude of boys, who clung to his sparse garments on every side, made his way to a tent. At the same moment a ludicrous figure forced a passage through the crowd, and came to a stand in the middle of the green. It was a diminutive creature, mounted on a pony that carried its owner on a saddle immediately below its neck, and a pair of paniers just above its tail. The rider was an elderly man with shaggy eyebrows and beard of mingled black and gray. His swarthy, keen wizened face was twisted into grotesque lines beneath a pair of little blinking eyes, which seemed to say that anybody who refused to see that they belonged to a perfectly, wideawake son of old Adam made a portentous mistake. He was the mountain peddler, and to-day, at least, his visit was opportune. "Lasses, here's for you! Look you, here's Gubblum Oglethorpe, pony and all." "Why, didsta ever see the like--Gubblum's getten hissel into a saddle!" Gubblum, from his seat on the pony, twisted one half of his wrinkled face awry, and said: "In course I have! But it's a vast easier getting into this saddle nor getting out of it, I can tell you!" "Why, how's that, Gubblum?" cried a voice from the crowd. "What, man, did you never hear of the day I bought it?" Sundry shakes of many heads were the response. "No?" said Gubblum, with an accent of sheer incredulity, and added, "Well, there is no accounting for the ignorance of some folks." "What happened to you, Gubblum?" Gubblum's expression of surprise gave place to a look of condescension. He lifted his bronzed and hairy hand to the rim of his straw hat to shade his eyes from the sun. "Well, when I got on to auld Bessy, here, I couldn't get off again--that's what happened." "No? Why?" "You see, I'd got my clogs on when I went to buy the saddle in Kezzick, and they're middling wide in the soles, my clogs are. So when I put my feet into the stirrups, there they stuck." "Stuck!"