'A land-agent,' answered Isaac Walton. 'A land-agent?' repeated the rector, misdoubting his ears. The saturnine angler made no answer. 'And has a gentleman been drowned here?' he persisted. The man only looked at him across the stream, and nodded. 'Eh! and his name, pray?' 'Old Nutter, of the Mills,' he replied. The rector made a woeful ejaculation, and stared at the careless operator, who had a pipe in his mouth the while, which made him averse from conversation. He would have liked to ask him more questions, but he was near the village, and refrained himself; and he met Toole at the corner of the bridge who, leaning on the shoulder of the rector's horse, gave him the sad story in full. CHAPTER LII. CONCERNING A ROULEAU OF GUINEAS AND THE CRACK OF A PISTOL. Dangerfield went up the river that morning with his rod and net, and his piscatory fidus Achates, Irons, at his elbow. It was a nice gray sky, but the clerk was unusually silent even for him; and the sardonic piscator appeared inscrutably amused as he looked steadily upon the running waters. Once or twice the spectacles turned full upon the clerk, over Dangerfield's shoulder, with a cynical light, as if he were on the point of making one of his ironical jokes; but he turned back again with a little whisk, the jest untold, whatever it was, to the ripple and the fly, and the coy gray troutlings. At last, Dangerfield said over his shoulder, with the same amused look, 'Do you remember Charles Archer?' Irons turned pale, and looked down embarrassed as it seemed, and began plucking at a tangled piece of tackle, without making any answer. 'Hey? Irons,' persisted Dangerfield, who was not going to let him off. 'Yes, I do,' answered the man surlily; 'I remember him right well; but I'd rather not, _and_ I won't speak of him, that's all.' 'Well, Charles Archer's _here_, we've seen him, haven't we? and just the devil he always was,' said Dangerfield with a deliberate chuckle of infinite relish, and evidently enjoying the clerk's embarrassment as he eyed him through his spectacles obliquely. 'He has seen _you_, too, he says; and thinks _you_ have seen _him_, hey?' and Dangerfield chuckled more and more knowingly, and watched his shiftings and sulkings with a pleasant grin, as he teased and quizzed him in his own enigmatical way. 'Well, supposing I _did_ see him,' said Irons, looking up, returning Dangerfield's comic glance with a bold and lowering stare; 'and supposing _he_ saw _me_, so long as we've no business one of another, and never talks like, nor seems to remember--I think 'tisnt, no ways, no one's business--that's what I say.' 'True, Irons, very true; you, I, and Sturk--the doctor I mean--are cool fellows, and don't want for nerve; but I think, don't you? we're afraid of Charles Archer, for all that.' 'Fear or no fear, I don't want to talk _to_ him nor _of_ him, no ways,' replied the clerk, grimly, and looking as black as a thunder-cloud.