“I advise you to come,” persuaded his neighbour.

“Never!  God is my judge, never!” cried Festus Clasby.

Again the tinkers clicked their tongues, looked at each other in wonder.

“You will be thankful you brought your life out of this,” said the neighbour.  “Let it not be said of you on the countryside that you were seen wrangling with the tinkers in this town.”

“Shame!  Shame!  Shame!” broke out like a shocked murmur among the attentive tinkers.

Festus Clasby faced his audience in all his splendid proportions.  Never was he seen so moved.  Never had such a great passion seized him.  The soft tones of his eyes were no longer soft.  They shone in fiery wroth.  “I will at least have that which I bought twice over!” he cried.  “I will have my tin can!”

Immediately the group of tinkers broke up in the greatest disorder.  Hoarse cries broke out among them.  They behaved like people upon whom some fearful doom had been suddenly pronounced.  The old women threw themselves about, racked with pain and terror.  They beat their hands together, threw wild arms in despairing gestures to the sky, raising a harrowing lamentation.  The men growled in sullen gutturals.  The youngsters knelt on the road, giving out the wild beagle-like howl.  Voices cried above the uproar:  “Where is it?  Where is the Can with the Diamond Notch?  Get him the Can with the Diamond Notch!  He must have the can with the Diamond Notch!  How can he travel without the Can with the Diamond Notch?  He’ll die without the Can with the Diamond Notch!”

Festus Clasby was endeavouring to deliver his soul of impassioned protests when his neighbour, assisted by a bystander or two, forcibly hoisted him up on his cart and he was driven away amid a great howling from the tinkers.

[Illustration:  Festus Clasby]

It was twilight when he reached his place among the hills, and the good white letters under the thatch showed clear to his eyes.  Pulling himself together he drove with an air about the gable and into the wide open yard at the back, fowls clearing out of his way, a sheep-dog coming to welcome him, a calf mewing mournfully over the half-door of a stable.  Festus Clasby was soothed by this homely, this worshipful, environment, and got off the cart with a sigh.  Inside the kitchen he could hear the faithful women trotting about preparing the great master’s meal.  He made ready to carry the provisions into the shop.  When he unwrapped the sacking from the bacon, something like a sudden stab went through his breast.  Perspiration came out on his forehead.  Several large long slices had been cut off in jagged slashes from the flitches.  They lay like wounded things on the body of the cart.  He pulled down the other purchases feverishly, horror in his face.  How many loaves had been torn off his batch of bread?  Where were all the packets of tea and sugar, the currants and raisins, the flour, the tobacco, the cream-of-tartar, the caraway seeds, the nutmeg, the lemon peel, the hair oil, the—­