One day a great event happened.  There was a fire in the town, and the house of Mr. Cutts, the saddler, was burnt down.  A week afterwards some very unpleasant rumours were abroad, and the Tacchis, with Mrs. and Mr. Cattle, and the two Misses Cattle, sat talking over them in Mr. Tacchi’s parlour after supper.  The Cattles were small farmers who lived about a mile out of Cowfold, on the way to Shott, but within Cowfold parish, and came to Cowfold Church.

“If,” said Cattle, “they can prove as the fire broke out in three places at once, the office has got him.”

“His stock,” continued his wife, “to my certain knowledge, warn’t worth fifty pound, for I was in the shop a fortnight ago, and says I to myself, ’What can the man have let it down like this for—­who’d come here for anything; and it did cross my mind as it was very odd, and I went home a thinking and a thinking, but of course I never dreamed as he was so awful wicked as this.”

“He was always very peculiar, mother,” said the elder Miss Cattle.  “Do you remember, Carry,” turning to her younger sister, “how he jumped out of the hedge that Sunday evening, just as we turned down our lane.  Oh my, I never had such a fright—­you might have knocked me down with a straw; and he never spoke, but walked straight on.”

“He might have been nutting,” said Giacomo—­“he was always going out nutting; and perhaps he didn’t notice he had frightened you.”

“Not notice!  I am sure he might have done; and then, why did he come out just then, I should like to know.  If he had come out just after we’d got by, I shouldn’t have thought so much of it.”

“If the poor man was in the hedge, he must come out at some time, and it happened to be just then,” observed Giacomo reflectively.

“Ah!” continued Carry, incapable of replying to Giacomo’s philosophy, and judiciously changing her attack, “whenever you went to buy anything he never spoke up to you like—­there was always an underhand look about him; and then his living alone as he did with nobody but that old woman with him.”

“He always sold good leather,” continued Mr. Cattle, who planted both his elbows on the table, and placed his head in his hands in a fit of abstraction, much perplexed by this apparent contradiction in Cutts’s character.

“Sold good leather,” retorted his wife with great sharpness, as if in contempt of her husband’s stupidity; “sold good leather—­of course he did.  That was part of his plan to make people believe he was an honest man.  Besides, if he hadn’t, how could he have got rid of his stock as he did.  Do you recollect,” she proceeded with increasing asperity, as became a Cowfold matron, “as it was him as got up that petition for that Catchpool gal as was going to be hanged for putting her baby in the pond?”

“His father,” quoth Mr. Cattle, inclining again to his wife’s side, “had a glass eye, and I’ve heerd his mother was a Papist.”