“He is, and I don’t mind letting any one know it. I’m very glad to see him settled down. He’s the only one along the road who hasn’t gone to the flower show to-day.” Here the tall man calls for another tankard, which, as he is doing all the talking, he does not pass to the small neat woman behind him. Pleased to be civilly used, and warmed by the liquor, he tells the story of his friend, the little woman helping him out, and landlord and labourers adding some touches; and Mr. Jones himself completed the picture during my few days in the village. The man who fed his neighbour’s dog, and sent the beggar satisfied away, and made presents to the children, and lived on six ounces of tobacco a week, is a native of Zennor in Cornwall. “Wonderful place for pedlars is Cornwall. The towns are so few and far between that the people along the road aren’t used to pedlars, and when you do call you are sure of the best of treatment.” He was apprenticed to a shoemaker in a town in South Devon, and for a time practised his trade there as an assistant. He was very clever at boxing and wrestling, and a hard fighter, too, though unwilling to make a quarrel. But he was a queer youth and took violent likes and dislikes to men, and one day he dropped a boot and went out into the street and took a young gentleman by the arm and said to him: “Excuse me, sir, you have passed this shop for five years nearly every day and I can’t stand it any longer.” Whereupon he gave that young gentleman a beating. He was sent to prison; he lost his employment and went to sea. And at sea or else in foreign countries he stayed six years. He left the sea only because he broke an arm which had at length to be amputated above the elbow. He was a changed man and many thought then that he was mad. When he left the hospital it was December and bitter weather: he had only five shillings and it was notorious how he spent it. Every day for a week he bought three loaves of bread and went out and fed the birds with them. When that week was over he had to go into the workhouse, and there he stayed until the spring. It was there that he fell in with the tall man who helped to tell his tale. They left together and for some time he almost kept the two by begging, his lack of an arm ensuring his success. But he was not altogether to his companion’s taste, nevertheless. He would stop and smoke a pipe and admire the view when he was miles from anywhere and their object was to reach a town and find enough money to pay for lodgings. He would stand by a hedge, content for an hour to disentangle the bryony strands that were in danger of straying to the road, and to restore them to the hazel and thorn where their fellows ramped. He was willing to be foster-father to half the helpless fledglings that he found on the roadside. Sleeping one night in a barn he could not be persuaded to leave until he had decided whether it was better to kill a spider who had a great appetite for flies or to leave it to Fate.