When Tompkins, with his cart half full of Sallies piled like flower-pots, pulled up again at the wayside inn, he found it dark and lonely. The four jolly gardeners were gone home, or at any rate gone somewhere; Teddy, the landlord, was fast asleep by the kitchen fire, and would so remain till roused by the music of the frying-pan; they kept no barmaid, and the man who generally lounged about the stable was gone to have his lounge out somewhere else. “Good-night, ’Liza,” Bill shouted up the staircase, on the chance of the landlady hearing his voice; but instead of any answer her step was heard, and she turned the corner on him with her shawl and bonnet on. “I couldn’t leave it so,” she said; “I don’t know what come over me. But after you was gone my heart fell all a pitter-pattering. And such bad ideas come into my head—I never did! I could no more sleep this blessed night, without knowing more about that there business, than I could stand on my head and strike the hours like a clock. I may be a fool for it, and have to go before the Justices; but ease my mind somehow I must.” “’Liza Rowles,” replied Selsey Bill, standing nearly two feet above her, but looking down with true deference, “if you feels that sort of thing, who am I to go again it? You are bound to have summat in your own mind, as was never put there for nothing, ma’am; and if it comes to that, why, so has I.” “Do you mean to say, Bill,” asked Mrs. Rowles with awe, not of his height, for she was used to that, but of his thoughts coming just to her level, “that you has had queer ideas too, about what the little girl was a-telling me?” “You have put it, ’Liza, in the very words as I should have put it in, if the Lord give me the power. But I leaves all that to my wife now. She can fit it up to meanin’, and no mistake.” “Very well, Bill, there’s no more to be said. Off I goes with you, and you drives round by Struck-tree Cottage, as we calls it; not that we means to make tantrups, you know; but just to see how it looks, and ease our minds.” Mrs. Rowles cast a glance at the high step of the cart, for she was not so tall as she was tender; and Selsey Bill cast a glance at her, balancing in the fine poise of his mind, whether or no he should venture to offer, as it were, to lift her. But he saw that it would not be just to his wife, who might come some day to hear of it—for you never can tell what those women will let out,—so he whipped forth his knife, and cut the cord which bound a dozen Sallies into one spire, and fetching out a basket, set it down upon the rim; so that Mrs. Rowles (though of good weight and measure) taking that for her first rung went up without a groan.