My second awakening was gradual. I at first became conscious of a sound, rising and falling with a certain monotonous regularity, that my drowsy ears could make nothing of. Little by little, however, the sound developed itself into a somewhat mournful melody or refrain, chanted by a not unmusical voice. I yawned and, having stretched myself, sat up to look and listen. And the words of the song were these: "When a man, who muffins cries, Cries not, when his father dies, 'Tis a proof that he would rather Have a muffin than his father." The singer was a tall, strapping fellow with a good-tempered face, whose ruddy health was set off by a handsome pair of black whiskers. As I watched him, he laid aside the pitchfork he had been using, and approached the wagon, but, chancing to look up, his eye met mine, and he stopped: "Hulloa!" he exclaimed, breaking short off in the middle of a note, "hulloa!" "Hallo!" said I. "W'at be doin' up theer?" "I was thinking," I returned, "that, under certain circumstances, I, for one, could not blame the individual, mentioned in your song, for his passionate attachment to muffins. At this precise moment a muffin—or, say, five or six, would be highly acceptable, personally." "Be you partial to muffins, then?" "Yes, indeed," said I, "more especially seeing I have not broken my fast since midday yesterday." "Well, an' w'at be doin' in my hay?" "I have been asleep," said I. "Well, an' what business 'ave ye got a-sleepin' an' a-snorin' in my hay?" "I was tired," said I, "and 'Nature her custom holds, let shame say what it will,' still—I do not think I snored." "'Ow do I know that—or you, for that matter?" rejoined the farmer, stroking his glossy whiskers, "hows'ever, if you be quite awake, come on down out o' my hay." As he said this he eyed me with rather a truculent air, likewise he clenched his fist. Thinking it wisest to appear unconscious of this, I nodded affably, and letting myself down from the hay, was next moment standing beside him. "Supposin' I was to thump 'ee on the nose?" he inquired. "What for?" "For makin' so free wi' my hay." "Why then," said I, "I should earnestly endeavor to thump you on yours." The farmer looked me slowly over from head to foot, with a dawning surprise. "Thought you was a common tramper, I did," said he. "Why, so I am," I answered, brushing the clinging hay from me. "Trampers o' the road don't wear gentlemen's clothes—leastways, I never see one as did." Here his eyes wandered over me again, from my boots upward. Half-way up, they stopped, evidently arrested by my waistcoat, a flowered satin of the very latest cut, for which I had paid forty shillings in the Haymarket, scarcely a week before; and, as I looked down at it, I would joyfully have given it, and every waistcoat that was ever cut, to have had that forty shillings safe back in my pocket again. "That be a mighty fine weskit, sir!" "Do you think so?" said I.