He turned and left her with great agility, while she—the foundations of her married life suddenly shaken by this earthquake—stood and stared and gasped up at heaven. Joseph quickly vanished into the dusk, and soon stood once more before the new vicar. Mr. Budd thereupon raised his eyes from his desk and asked a question without words. “Well, your honour, ’tis like this here: I’ll go back to church again very next Sunday as falls in.” “Ah! But I thought that Joseph would be in bondage to no man?” “Nor no woman neither,” said Mr. Hannaford. A TRAVELLER’S TALE “He’m a monkey that hath seen the world, no doubt,” said Merryweather Chugg, the water-bailiff. “Yes—an’ brought back some nuts wi’ gold kernels, by all accounts,” answered Noah Sage; “though he ban’t going to crack none here, I reckon, for the chap’s only come to have a look at the home of his youth; then he’m off again to foreign parts.” The two old men sat in the parlour of the “Bellaford” Inn at Postbridge, and about them gathered other labouring folk. All were inhabitants of the Dartmoor district, and most had been born and bred in the valley of East Dart or upon adjacent farms. This village, of which the pride and glory is an old bridge that spans the river, shall be found upon the shaggy breast of the Moor, like an oasis in the desert; for here much land has been snatched from the hungry heath, groves of beech and sycamore lie in the bosom of these undulating wastes, and close at hand are certain snug tenement farms whereon men have dwelt and wrestled with the wild land from time immemorial. To-day a native had returned to his home; and as a vacant room at the “Bellaford” Inn well served his purpose, Mr. Robert Bates secured it for a fortnight, that he might wander again about his boyhood’s haunts and shine a little in the eyes of those who still remembered him. That night he had promised to relate his experiences in the public bar; he had also let it be known that upon this great occasion beer and spirits would flow free of all cost for old friends and new. “He’ll have to address a overflowed meeting, like a Member of Parliament,” said Michael French, the Moor-man, “for be blessed if us can all get in your bar, Mrs. Capern.” “Lots of room yet,” she said, “if you’d only turn some of they boys out-of-doors. They won’t drink nought, so I’d rather have their room than their company.” “I should think you was oncommon excited to see this chap, ban’t you?” asked Noah Sage of a very ancient patriarch in the corner. “It was up to Hartland Farm, when you was head man there, that Bob Bates comed as a ’pretence from Moreton Poorhouse, if I can remember.” “Ess fay, ’tis so,” said the other. “You ax un if the thrashings I used to give un every other day for wasting his time weern’t the makin’ of un; an’ if he ban’t a liar, he’ll say ’twas so. If he owes thanks to any man, ’tis to old Jacob Pearn—though I say it myself.”