“Bundock’s breeches be the Queen’s,” said Caleb reassuringly. But laying down his scythe, he began to move mazedly adown the orchard, and before the postman’s mud-cased leggings had floundered many more rods, the veteran was sitting astride his stile, dangling his top-boots over a rotten-planked brook, and waving in his hairy, mahogany hand his vast red handkerchief like a danger signal. “Ahoy, Posty!” Bundock responded with a cheerful blast on his bugle. “Ahoy, Uncle Flynt!” “Turn back. Don’t, ye’ll strike a bog-hole.” “I never go back!” cried the dauntless Bundock. And even as he spoke, his stature shrank till his bag rested on the ooze. “The missus was afeared you’d spoil the Queen’s breeches,” said Caleb sympathetically. “Catch hold of yon crab-apple branch.” “Better spoil her breeches than be unfaithful to her uniform,” said the slimy hero, struggling up as directed. “I’ve got a letter for you.” Caleb’s flag fell into the brook and startled a water-rat. “A letter for us!” He splashed into the water, still dazedly, to rescue his handkerchief, avoiding the plank as a superfluous preliminary to the wetting; and, standing statuesque in mid-stream, more like Father Neptune now than Father Time, he continued incredulously: “Who’d be sendin’ us a letter?” “That’s not my business,” cried Bundock sternly. He came on heroically, disregarding a posterior consciousness of damp clay, and picking his way along the grassy, squashy strip that was starred treacherously with peaceful daisies and buttercups, over-hung by wild apple-trees, and hedged from the fields on either hand by a tall, prickly tangle and congestion—as of a vegetable slum—in which gorse, holly, speedwell, mustard, and lily of the valley (still in green sheaths), strove for breathing space. At the edge of a palpable mudhole he paused perforce. Caleb, who, when he recovered from his daze at the news of the letter, had advanced with dripping boots to meet him, was equally arrested at the opposite frontier, and the two men now faced each other across some fifteen feet of flowery ooze, two studies in red; Caleb, big-limbed and stolid, in his crimson shirt, and Bundock, dapper and peart, in his scarlet jacket. The postman’s face was lightly pockmarked, but found by females fascinating, especially under the quasi-military cap. Hairlessness was part of its open charm: his sun-tanned cheek kept him juvenile despite his half-century, and preserved from rust his consciousness of a worshipping womanhood. Caleb, on the contrary, was all hair, little bushes growing even out of his ears, and whiskers and beard and the silver-grey mop at his crown running into one another without frontiers—the “Nonconformist fringe” in a ragged edition. “Sow sorry to give ye sow much ill-convenience,” he called apologetically. “Oi count,” he added, having had time for reflection, “one of our buoy-oys has written from furrin parts. And he wouldn’t be knowing the weather here.”