“Let us hope that you have both contracted a more serviceable friendship in another direction,” said the doctor, and Bessie laughed.  She was aware that his estimate of feminine friendship was not exalted.

About half a mile farther, where a byroad turned off towards Fairfield, the riders came upon a remarkable group in high debate over a donkey—­Lady Latimer, Gampling the tinker, and the rural policeman.  My lady instantly summoned Mr. Carnegie to her succor in the fray, which, to judge from her countenance and the stolid visage of the emissary of the law, was obstinate.  It appeared that the policeman claimed to arrest the donkey and convey him to the pound.  The dry and hungry beast had been tethered by his master in the early morning where a hedge and margin of sward bordered the domain of Admiral Parkins.  Uninstructed in modern law, he broke loose and strayed along the green, cropping here and there a succulent shoot of thorn or thistle, until, when approaching repletion, he was surprised by the policeman, reprimanded, captured, and led ignominiously towards the gaol for vagrant animals—­a donkey that everybody knew.

“He’s took the innicent ass into custody, and me he’s going to summons and get fined,” Gampling exclaimed, his indignation not abated by the appearance of another friend upon the scene, for a friend he still counted the doctor, though he persisted in his refusal to mend his kettles and pots and pans.

“Is not this an excess of zeal, Cobb?” remonstrated Mr. Carnegie.  “Suppose you let the ass off this time, and consider him warned not to do it again?”

“Sir, my instructions is not to pass over any infringement of the new h’act.  Straying is to be put down,” said Cobb stiffly.

“This here ass have earned his living honest a matter of eight year, and naught ever laid agen his character afore by high nor low,” pleaded Gampling, growing pathetic as authority grew more stern.  “Her ladyship and the doctor will speak a good word for him, and there’s others as will.”

“Afore the bench it may be of vally and go to lowering the fine,” said the invincible exponent of the law; “I ain’t nothing to do with that.”

“I’ll tell you where it is, Cobb,” urged Gampling, swelling into anger again.  “This here ass knows more o’ nat’ral justice than the whole boiling o’ new h’acts.  He’d never be the man to walk into her ladyship’s garden an’ eat up her flowerbeds:  raason why, he’d get a jolly good hiding if he did.  But he says to hisself, he says, when he sees a nice bite o’ clover or a sow-thistle by the roadside:  “This here’s what’s left for the poor, the fatherless, and the widder—­it ain’t much, but thank God for small mercies!’—­an’ he falls to.  Who’s he robbed, I should like to know?”

“You must ask the admiral that when you come up before the magistrates on Saturday,” rejoined Cobb severely—­his professional virtue sustained, perhaps, by the presence of witnesses.