All of that may be true; and yet there may be so many exceptions. At any rate, Master Leviticus Cripps looked none the worse for the whole of it. His cheeks were of richly varied fibre, like a new-shelled kidney-bean; his mouth (of a very considerable size) looked comfortable and not hungry; and all around him there was an influence tending to intimate that he had dined. For that he did not care as he should. He was not a man who allowed his dinner to modify his character. The best streaky bacon and three new-laid eggs had nurtured and manured his outer man, but failed to improve him inwardly. Even the expression of his face was very slightly mollified by a first-rate meal; though some of the corners looked lubricated. "Hath a been by again, or hath a not?" whispered Tickuss to himself, as he stared at a tangled web of ruts, and blessed the east wind for confounding of them, so that a wheel could not swear to its own. The east wind answered with a scolding dash, that cast his sack over his head, and shook out his white smock, scattering over the view, like a jack-towel on the washing-line. Acknowledging this salutation with a curse, Leviticus gathered his sack more tightly, and bending one long leg before him, stealthily peered awry at the wheel-tracks. This was the way to discover whatever had happened last among them, instead of looking across or along them, where the nicer shades would fail. At first he could make but little of it. The east wind, whirling last year's leaves from the couches where the west had piled them, and parching the flakes of the mud (as if exposed upon a scraper), had made it a hard thing to settle the date of the transit even of a timber dray. One of these had passed not long ago, with a great trunk swinging and swagging on the road, and slurring the scollops of the horse-track. Therefore Tickuss, for some time, looked less wise than usual, and scratched his head. The brain replied, as it generally does, to this soft local stimulant, so briskly in fact that the master soon was able to clap both his hands into their natural home--the pockets of his breeches--and thus to survey the scene, and grin. "Did 'ee think to do me, then, old brother Zak? Now did 'ee, did 'ee, did 'ee? Ah, I were aborn afore you, Zak; or if I were not, it were mother's mistake. Go along wi 'ee, Zak, go along wi' 'ee! Go home to thy cat, and thy little kitten, Etty." He knew, by the track, that his brother had passed a good while ago, or he would not have dared to speak in this rebellious vein. And what he said next was even more disloyal.