Immersed in these studies, Doctor Unonius found no leisure to think of matrimony; and his friends and neighbours often took occasion to deplore it, for he was an extremely personable man, fresh-coloured and hale, of clean and regular habits, and, moreover, kind-hearted to a fault.  All Polpeor agreed that he needed a wife to look after him, to protect him from being robbed; and Polpeor (to do it justice) did not say this without knowledge.  The good man could never be persuaded that Polpeor folk—­his folk—­were capable of doing him a wrong; but certain it is that learnedly as he wrote ’On the Cultivation of Apple Trees,’ the fruit of his carefully tended standards and espaliers seldom arrived at his own table.  They burgeoned, they bloomed; the blossom ‘pitched,’ as we say in the West; the fruit swelled, ripened, and then—­

Garden shows were rarities in those days:  but Tregarrick (Polpeor’s nearest market town) boasted a Horticultural Society and an annual Exhibition.  Whether from indolence or modesty Doctor Unonius never competed, but he seldom missed to visit the show and to con the exhibits.  The date was then, and is to this day, the Feast of St Matthew, which falls on the twenty-first of September:  and one year, on the morrow of St Matthew’s Feast, the doctor, gazing pensively over his orchard gate at a noble tree of fruit, remarked to his friend and next-door neighbour, Captain Minards, late of the merchant service—­

’Do you know, Minards, I was at Tregarrick yesterday; and I think—­ yes, without vaunting, I really think that the best of my pearmains yonder would have stood a fair chance of the prize for Table Varieties.’

‘The prize?’ grunted Captain Minards.  ’Don’t you fret about that:  you won it all right.’

‘Eh?’ queried Doctor Unonius, wiping his spectacles.

‘Ay,’ said Captain Minards, filling a pipe; ’you won it, right enough.’

‘But—­’

‘There’s no “but” about it.  And what vexes me,’ pursued Captain Minards, ’is that the rascals don’t even trouble to rob you neatly.  See that branch broken, yonder.’

‘That’s with the weight of the crop.’

‘Weight o’ my fiddlestick!  And the ground all strewed with short twigs!’

‘The wind’s doing.’

‘When you know the weather has been flat calm for a week past!’

’There’s an extraordinary eddy just here, at the turn of the valley; I have often observed a puff of wind—­you might almost call it a gust—­spring up with no apparent reason.’

‘Well, you’re a man of science,’ Captain Minards replied doggedly, ‘and if you tell me this puff o’ wind carried your pearmains all the way to Tregarrick and entered ’em at the show under some other body’s name, I’m bound to believe you.  But I wonder you don’t put it into a book.  It’s interestin’ enough.’

With this Parthian shot he departed.  But two nights later he was awakened in his bedroom, which overlooked the doctor’s orchard, by a strange rustling among the apple trees. Thud—­thud!—­there as he lay he listened for half a minute to the sounds of the dropping fruit.