“Oh, yes.  It’s but a poor chance with him now, I guess.  I’d a notion that I could find out some little particular, you see—­”

“No, I don’t see.”

“To be sure you don’t, but that’s my say.  Everybody has a say, you know.”

“No, I don’t know.”

“To be sure, of course you don’t know, but that’s what I tell you.  Now you must know—­”

“Don’t say must to me, strannger, if you want that we shall keep hands off.  I don’t let any man say must to me.”

“No harm, my friend—­I didn’t mean no harm,” said the worried pedler, not knowing what to make of his acquaintance, who spoke shrewdly at times, but occasionally in a speech, which awakened the doubts of the pedler as to the safety of his wits.  Avoiding all circumlocution of phrase, and dropping the “you sees,” and “you knows” from his narration, he proceeded to state his agency in procuring testimony for the youth, and of the ill-success which had hitherto attended him.  At length, in the course of his story, which he contrived to tell with as much caution as came within the scope of his education, he happened to speak of Lucy Munro; but had scarcely mentioned her name when his queer companion interrupted him:—­

“Look you, strannger, I’ll lick you now, off-hand, if you don’t put Miss for a handle to the gal’s name.  She’s Miss Lucy.  Don’t I know her, and han’t I seen her, and isn’t it I, Chub Williams, as they calls me, that loves the very airth she treads?”

“You know Miss Lucy?” inquired the pedler, enraptured even at this moderate discovery, though carefully coupling the prefix to her name while giving it utterance—­“now, do you know Miss Lucy, friend, and will you tell me where I can find her?”

“Do you think I will, and you may be looking arter her too?  ’Drot my old hat, strannger, but I do itch to git at you.”

“Oh, now, Mr. Williams—­”

“I won’t answer to that name.  Call me Chub Williams, if you wants to be perlite.  Mother always calls me Chub, and that’s the reason I like it.”

“Well, Chub,”—­said the other, quite paternally—­“I assure you I don’t love Miss Munro—­and—­”

“What! you don’t love Miss Lucy.  Why, everybody ought to love her.  Now, if you don’t love her, I’ll hammer you, strannger, off hand.”

The poor pedler professed a proper sort of love for the young lady—­not exactly such as would seek her for a wife, however, and succeeded in satisfying, after a while, the scruples of one who, in addition to deformity, he also discovered to labor under the more serious curse of partial idiocy.  Having done this, and flattered, in sundry other ways, the peculiarities of his companion, he pursued his other point with laudable pertinacity.

He at length got from Chub his own history:  how he had run into the woods with his mother, who had suffered from the ill-treatment of her husband:  how, with his own industry, he had sustained her wants, and supplied her with all the comforts which a long period had required; and how, dying at length, she had left him—­the forest boy—­alone, to pursue those toils which heretofore had an object, while she yielded him in return for them society and sympathy.  These particulars, got from him in a manner the most desultory, were made to preface the more important parts of the narrative.