The Carrier, while he munched his bacon, and drank his quart of home-brewed ale, was, in his quiet mind, more troubled than he had ever been before, or, at any rate, since he used to pass the tent of young Cinnaminta. That was the one great romance of his life, and since he had quelled it with his sturdy strength, and looked round the world as usual, scarcely any trouble worse than pence and halfpence had been on him. From week to week, and year to year, he had worked a cheerful road of life, breathing the fine air, looking at the sights, feeling as little as need be felt the influence of nature, making new friends all along his beat, even quicker than the old ones went their way, carrying on a very decent trade, highly respecting the powers that be, and highly respected by them. But now he found suddenly brought before him a matter for consideration, which, in his ordinary state of mind, would have circulated for a fortnight. Precipitance of mind to him was worse than driving down a quarry; his practice had always been, and now it was become his habit, to turn every question inside out and upside down, and across and across, and finger every seam of it (as if he were buying a secondhand sack) ere ever he began to trust his weight to any side of it. To do all this required some hours with a mind so unelectric, and even after that he liked to have a good night's sleep, and find the core of his resolve set hard in the morning. For this due process there was now no time. He dared not even to begin it, knowing that it could not be wrought out; therefore he betook himself to a plan which once before had served him well. After groping in the bottom of a sacred pocket (where sample-beans and scarlet runners got into the loops of keys, and bits of whipcord were wound tightly round old turnpike tickets, and a little shoemaker's awl in a cork kept company with a shoe-pick), Master Cripps with his blunt-headed fingers got hold of a crooked sixpence. The bend alone would have only conferred a simple charm upon it, but when to the bend there was added a hole, that sixpence became Delphic. Cripps had consulted it once before when a quick-tempered farmer hurried him concerning the purchase of a rick of hay. The Carrier had no superstition, but he greatly abounded with gratitude; and, having made a great hit about that rick, the least he could do to the sixpence was to consult it again under similar hurry. He said to himself, "Now the Lord send me right. If you comes out heads, little Etty shall go; if you comes out tails, I shall take it for a sign that we ought to turn tails in this here job." He said no more, but with great extrication worked his oracular sixpence up through a rattle of obstructions. Like the lots cast in a steep-headed man's helmet, up came the sixpence reluctantly.