Then he turned away with a joke, and began to feed her nicely, for she was very dainty.  Not a husk of oat would she touch that had been under the breath of another horse, however hungry she might be.  And with her oats he mixed some powder, fetching it from his saddle-bags.  What this was I could not guess, neither would he tell me, but laughed and called it “star-shavings.”  He watched her eat every morsel of it, with two or three drinks of pure water, ministered between whiles; and then he made her bed in a form I had never seen before, and so we said “Good-night” to her.

Afterwards by the fireside he kept us very merry, sitting in the great chimney-corner, and making us play games with him.  And all the while he was smoking tobacco in a manner I never had seen before, not using any pipe for it, but having it rolled in little sticks about as long as my finger, blunt at one end and sharp at the other.  The sharp end he would put in his mouth, and lay a brand of wood to the other, and then draw a white cloud of curling smoke, and we never tired of watching him.  I wanted him to let me do it, but he said, “No, my son; it is not meant for boys.”  Then Annie put up her lips and asked, with both hands on his knees (for she had taken to him wonderfully), “Is it meant for girls then cousin Tom?” But she had better not have asked, for he gave it her to try, and she shut both eyes, and sucked at it.  One breath, however, was quite enough, for it made her cough so violently that Lizzie and I must thump her back until she was almost crying.  To atone for that, cousin Tom set to, and told us whole pages of stories, not about his own doings at all, but strangely enough they seemed to concern almost every one else we had ever heard of.  Without halting once for a word or a deed, his tales flowed onward as freely and brightly as the flames of the wood up the chimney, and with no smaller variety.  For he spoke with the voices of twenty people, giving each person the proper manner, and the proper place to speak from; so that Annie and Lizzie ran all about, and searched the clock and the linen-press.  And he changed his face every moment so, and with such power of mimicry that without so much as a smile of his own, he made even mother laugh so that she broke her new tenpenny waistband; and as for us children, we rolled on the floor, and Betty Muxworthy roared in the wash-up.

[Illustration:  092.jpg Tailpiece]

CHAPTER XII

A MAN JUSTLY POPULAR

[Illustration:  093.jpg Tom Faggus]

Now although Mr. Faggus was so clever, and generous, and celebrated, I know not whether, upon the whole, we were rather proud of him as a member of our family, or inclined to be ashamed of him.  And indeed I think that the sway of the balance hung upon the company we were in.  For instance, with the boys at Brendon—­for there is no village at Oare—­I was exceeding proud to talk of him, and would freely brag of my Cousin Tom.  But with the rich parsons of the neighbourhood, or the justices (who came round now and then, and were glad to ride up to a warm farm-house), or even the well-to-do tradesmen of Porlock—­in a word, any settled power, which was afraid of losing things—­with all of them we were very shy of claiming our kinship to that great outlaw.