Then he sat down to rest, and let his forehead drop on to the grass to cool it.  When he rose again the road seemed to swim around him.  A farm servant in a smock was leading two horses, and as he passed he bade the wayfarer, “Good afternoon.”  Robbie went on without seeming to hear, but when the man had got beyond the sound of his voice he turned as if by sudden impulse, and, waving his hand with a gesture of cordiality, he returned the salutation.

Then he sat down once more and held his head between his hands.  It was beating furiously, and his body, too, from head to foot, was changing rapidly from hot to cold.  At length the consciousness took possession of him that he was ill.  “I doubt I’m badly,” he thought, and tried to realize his position.  Presently he attempted to rise and call back the countryman with the horses.  Lifting himself on one trembling knee, he waved a feeble arm spasmodically in the air, and called and called again.  The voice startled him; it seemed not to be his own.  His strength was spent.  He sank back and remembered no more.

The man in the smock was gone, but another countryman was coming down the road at that moment from the direction of Carlisle.  This was no other than little blink-eyed Reuben Thwaite.  He was sitting muffled up in his farm wagon and singing merry snatches to keep the cold out of his lungs.  Reuben had been at Carlisle over night with sundry hanks of thread, which he had sold to the linen weavers.  He had found a good market by coming so far, and he was returning to Wythburn in high feckle.  When he came (as he would have said) “ebbn fornenst” Robbie lying at the roadside, he jumped down from his seat.  “What poor lad’s this?  Why, what!  What say!  What!” holding himself back to grasp the situation, “Robbie Anderson!”

Then a knowing smile overspread Reuben’s wrinkled features as he stooped to pat and push the prostrate man, in an effort to arouse him to consciousness.

“Tut, Robbie, lad; Robbie, ma lad!  This wark will nivver do, Robbie!  Brocken loose agen, aye!  Come, Robbie, up, lad!”

Robbie lay insensible to all Reuben’s appeals, whether of the nature of banter or half-serious menace.

“Weel, weel, the lad has had a fair cargo intil him this voyage, anyway.”

There was obviously no likelihood of awakening Robbie, so with a world of difficulty, with infinite puffing and fuming and perspiring, and the help of a passing laborer, Reuben contrived to get the young fellow lifted bodily into his cart.  Lying there at full length, a number of the empty thread sacks were thrown over the insensible man, and then Reuben mounted to his seat and drove off.

“Poor old Martha Anderson!” muttered Reuben to himself.  “It’s weel she’s gone, poor body!  It wad nigh have brocken her heart—­and it’s my belief ’at it did.”

They had not gone far before Reuben himself, with the inconsistency of more pretentious moralists, felt an impulse to indulge in that benign beverage of which he had just deplored the effects.  Drawing up with this object at a public house that stood on the road, he called for a glass of hot spirits.  He was in the act of taking it from the hands of the landlord, when a stage-coach drove up, and the coachman and two of the outside passengers ordered glasses of brandy.