As he spoke he pointed down the valley, where the red deer, my late friend, was crossing, for his evening browse, to a gnoll of juicy grass. Then why was he pursuing him, and why did he call him his prey? The latter, probably a pretext to escape me, but the former question I could not answer, and did not choose to ask. He went his way, and I felt discharged of half my obligation. CHAPTER IV. The farmer, his wife, and little Sally were now all I had to love. Poor Ann Maples, though thoroughly honest and faithful, was of a nature so dry and precise that I respected rather than loved her. I am born to love and hate with all my heart and soul, although a certain pride prevents me from exhibiting the better passion, except when strongly moved. That other feeling, sown by Satan, he never allows me to disguise. To leave the only three I loved was a bitter grief, to tell them of my intention, a sore puzzle. But, after searching long for a good way to manage it, the only way I found was to tell them bluntly, and not to cry if it could be helped. So when Mrs. Huxtable came in full glory to try upon me a pair of stockings of the brightest blue ever seen, which she had long been knitting on the sly, for winter wear, I thanked her warmly, and said: "Dear me, Mrs. Huxtable, how they will admire these in London." "In Lonnon, cheel!" she always called me her child, since I had lost my mother--"they’ll never see the likes of they in Lonnon, without they gits one of them there long glaskies, same as preventive chaps has, and then I reckon there’ll be Hexymoor between, and Dartmoor too, for out I know, and ever so many church-towers and milestones." "Oh yes, they will. I shall be there in a week." "In Lonnon in a wake! Dear heart alaive, cheel, dont’e tell on so!" She thought my wits were wandering, as she had often fancied of late, and set off for the larder, which was the usual course of her prescriptions. But I stopped her so calmly that she could not doubt my sanity. "Yes, dear Mrs. Huxtable, I must leave my quiet home, where all of you have been so good and kind to me; and I have already written to take lodgings in London." "Oh, Miss Clerer, dear, I can’t belave it nohow! Come and discoorse with farmer about it. He knows a power more than I do, though I says it as shouldn’t. But if so be he hearkens to the like of that, I’ll comb him with the toasting iron." Giving me no time to answer, she led me to the kitchen. The farmer, who had finished his morning’s work, was stamping about outside the threshold, wiping his boots most carefully with a pitchfork and a rope of twisted straw. This process, to his great discomfort, Mrs. Huxtable had at length enforced by many scoldings; but now she snatched the pitchfork from him, and sent it flying into the court. "Wun’t thee never larn, thee girt drummedary, not to ston there an hour, mucking arl the place?"