“Eighteen is the money. Not a farthing under. From all that I can hear, it will be twenty pence to-morrow. Why, here’s another fine peach fit to come! I shall send it to your wife, and tell her you ate hers.” The gardener merrily nailed away, while the baker was working his hands for nothing. “You would never do such a thing as that,” he said; “a single man have no call to understand a woman; but he knows what their nature is, or why did he avoid them? My wife is as good a woman as can be; but none of them was ever known to be quite perfect. If it must be eighteen, it must—and I’ll take fifty.” “Ah, couldn’t I tell you a bit of news?” said the baker, as he counted out the money. “You are such a silent man, Mr. Orchardson, that a man of the world is afraid of you. And the young fellow, your own nevvy—well, he may take after you in speech, but not about the ladies—ah, you never would believe it!” “Well, then, keep it to yourself, that’s all. I don’t want to hear a word against young Kit. And what’s more—if I heard fifty, I wouldn’t believe one of them.” “No more wouldn’t I. He’s as steady a young fellow as ever drove a tax-cart. And so quiet in his manners, why, you wouldn’t think that butter—” “His mother was a lady of birth and breeding. That’s where he gets his manners from; though there’s plenty in our family for folk that deserve them. Out with your news, man, whatever it is.” “Well, it don’t go again him much,” the baker replied, with some fear—for my Uncle’s face was stern, and the wall-hammer swung in his brown right hand; “and indeed you might take it the other way, if he had done it all on his road home from church. You know the bridge over the Halliford brook, or at least where it was, for it’s all washed away, as you heard very likely this morning. What right had your nevvy there, going on for dark?” My Uncle was a rather large-minded man; but without being loose, or superior. “Rasp, if it comes to that,” he said, “what right have you and I to be anywhere?” “That’s neither here nor there,” answered the baker, having always been a man of business; “but wherever I go, I pay my way. However, your Kit was down there, and no mistake. What you think he done? He punched Sam Henderson’s head to begin with, for fear of him giving any help, and then he jumped into the water, that was coming like a house on fire from Tim Osborne’s dam, and out of it he pulled Mother Marker, and the pretty young lady as had been in church.” “Kit can swim,” said my Uncle shortly. “It is a very dangerous trick to learn, being bound to jump in, whenever any one is drowning. Did the women go in, for him to pull them out?”