Tinker and occasionally literary cove. I have left you some breakfast also fire to cook same, eat hearty. You will find a frying-pan in a cleft of the tree we slept under. Thereupon, being much more hungry than was my wont, I came to the tree in question and presently found a roomy cleft where was the frying-pan, sure enough. And now, having made up the fire, I set about cooking my breakfast for the first time in my life and found it no great business, turning the rashers this way and that in the pan until what with their delectable sight and smell, my hunger grew to a voracious desire that amazed me by its intensity. So, placing the frying-pan on the grass between my knees, I began to eat with the aid of my penknife and a hunch of crusty bread, and never in all my days enjoyed anything more. In due time, the bacon being despatched together with the greater part of the loaf and cheese, I lay propped against the tree, blinking in the sun and drowsily content. But this blissful aftermath was presently marred by haunting memories of tea, coffee and creamy chocolate until at last, roused by an insistent and ever-growing thirst, I arose, minded to seek some means of assuaging this appetite. Thus, having scrubbed out the frying-pan with a handful of bracken, I restored it to the tree and set out. After some little while I came on a brook bubbling pleasantly amid mossy stones and yet, though it looked sweet and clean enough, I could not bring myself to drink of it, being too proud-stomached, and must go wandering on, plagued by my thirst, until, chancing on the same brook or another, I could resist no longer, and stretching myself full-length upon the bank I stooped to the murmurous water and drank my fill and found it none so ill, although a little brackish. As the day advanced, the cool wind died away so that what with the heat and this unwonted exercise I grew distressed and was about to cast myself down in the shade of a hedge, when I espied a small tavern bowered in trees some little distance along the road, very pleasant to see, and hasted thitherward accordingly. I was yet some distance away when I became aware that something untoward was afoot, for, borne to my ears, came a sound of excited voices, dominated all at once by one deep and hoarse and loud in virtuous indignation. "Drunk me beer, I tell 'ee--every drop! Drunk me beer at one gullup so quick's a flash--the 'eartless ruffin!" Hereupon rose an answering chorus. "Throw 'im out! Duck 'im! Gi'e 'un one for 'isself!" Reaching the tavern, I halted on the threshold of a low, wide chamber, floored with red tiles and furnished with oaken tables and benches, where I beheld some half-dozen angry country-fellows grouped about a solitary individual who fronted them in very desperate and determined manner, his back to the wall; an extremely down-at-heels gentleman this, who yet cocked his hat and glared about him with an air of polite ferocity.