A poor half-starved looking fellow, with a merry eye, that poverty had sunk, but could not quench, now made up to him, and strove to bargain for a few yards of his flannel; but on reckoning his money, found he could not come up to his price, as he said he had to buy a three-legged iron pot, in addition to a winter petticoat for his wife: “and,” observed the man of tatters, with a grin of miserable mirth, “it will be better for her to go without flannel than our whole family to want a porridge pot.” Twm liked this man, but not his logic; conceiving he made too light an affair of what was perhaps heavy about his dame, who might be no sylph in figure; which implied a want of courtesy and due deference to that fair train, whose indisputable right to warm petticoats claimed precedence of all pots, pans, and every earthly consideration. “Here, take this bale, take it all, for I have lost my yard and scissors, and pay me when you grow rich;—confound your thanks! away with you, bestow it safe, then return here; perhaps I may get thee an iron pot at as cheap a rate as the flannel.” This ragged man, by his alacrity and silent obedience, seemed to understand the spirit he had to deal with. Off he ran with his enormous present, and immediately returned; when our hero accompanied him to the shop of an old curmudgeon of an ironmonger, whose face, hardly distinguishable behind his habitual screen of snuff and spectacles, seemed of the same material as his own hard ware. The man of rags was quite in luck, and, as instructed, followed his benefactor into the shop in silence. Twm examined the culinary ware, with all the caution of an old farm wife, asking the prices of various articles, and turned up the whites of his eyes in the most approved puritanic fashion, expressive of astonishment at such excessive charges. Old Hammerhead indignantly repelled the insinuation, and swore that cheaper or better pots were never seen in the kitchen of a king. “Then you must mean the king of the beggars,” quoth Twm, “for you have nothing here but damaged ware.” “Damaged devil! what do you mean?” roared the enraged ironmonger. “I mean,” replied Twm Shôn Catti, with provoking equanimity, “that there is scarcely a pot here without a hole in it; now this which I hold in my hand, for instance, has one.” “Where! where!” asks the fiery old shopkeeper, holding it up between his eyes and the light; “if there is a hole in this pot I’ll eat it: where is the hole that you speak of?” “Here!” bawls the inexorable hoaxer, pulling it over his ears, and holding it there, while the necessitous man, who did not seem much unlike a thief, took the wink from his patron, and was walking off with a choice article, which he had selected from the whole lot, when Twm whispered in his ear, “Take better care of it than you did of the two sheep and white ox.” “Thou art either the devil or Twm Shôn Catti,” replied the other, in an under tone. “Mum! and be off,” said Twm, and off went shrewd