In spite of the caution Anthony had impressed upon his country relative, that he should not judge by appearances, he was nevertheless under an apprehension that the farmer’s opinion of him, and the luxurious, almost voluptuous, enjoyment he had of it, were in peril.  When he had purchased the well-probed fat goose, the shrimps, and the cheese, he was only half-satisfied.  His ideas shot boldly at a bottle of wine, and he employed a summer-lighted evening in going a round of wine-merchants’ placards, and looking out for the cheapest bottle he could buy.  And he would have bought one—­he had sealing-wax of his own and could have stamped it with the office-stamp of Boyne’s Bank for that matter, to make it as dignified and costly as the vaunted red seals and green seals of the placards—­he would have bought one, had he not, by one of his lucky mental illuminations, recollected that it was within his power to procure an order to taste wine at the Docks, where you may get as much wine as you like out of big sixpenny glasses, and try cask after cask, walking down gas-lit paths between the huge bellies of wine which groan to be tapped and tried, that men may know them.  The idea of paying two shillings and sixpence for one miserable bottle vanished at the richly-coloured prospect.  “That’ll show him something of what London is,” thought Anthony; and a companion thought told him in addition that the farmer, with a skinful of wine, would emerge into the open air imagining no small things of the man who could gain admittance into those marvellous caverns.  “By George! it’s like a boy’s story-book,” cried Anthony, in his soul, and he chuckled over the vision of the farmer’s amazement—­acted it with his arms extended, and his hat unseated, and plunged into wheezy fits of laughter.

He met his guests at the station.  Mr. Fleming was soberly attired in what, to Anthony’s London eye, was a curiosity costume; but the broad brim of the hat, the square cut of the brown coat, and the leggings, struck him as being very respectable, and worthy of a presentation at any Bank in London.

“You stick to a leather purse, brother William John?” he inquired, with an artistic sentiment for things in keeping.

“I do,” said the farmer, feeling seriously at the button over it.

“All right; I shan’t ask ye to show it in the street,” Anthony rejoined, and smote Rhoda’s hand as it hung.

“Glad to see your old uncle—­are ye?”

Rhoda replied quietly that she was, but had come with the principal object of seeing her sister.

“There!” cried Anthony, “you never get a compliment out of this gal.  She gives ye the nut, and you’re to crack it, and there maybe, or there mayn’t be, a kernel inside—­she don’t care.”

“But there ain’t much in it!” the farmer ejaculated, withdrawing his fingers from the button they had been teasing for security since Anthony’s question about the purse.