A squeaky voice was heard from the other side of the garden hedge of clipped yew.

“Hi! farmer, is that the missing young man?” and presently a neighbour, by name John Sedgett, came trotting through the gate, and up the garden path.

“I say,” he remarked, “here’s a rumpus.  Here’s a bobbery up at Fairly.  Oh!  Bob Eccles!  Bob Eccles!  At it again!”

Mr. Sedgett shook his wallet of gossip with an enjoying chuckle.  He was a thin-faced creature, rheumy of eye, and drawing his breath as from a well; the ferret of the village for all underlying scandal and tattle, whose sole humanity was what he called pitifully ‘a peakin’ at his chest, and who had retired from his business of grocer in the village upon the fortune brought to him in the energy and capacity of a third wife to conduct affairs, while he wandered up and down and knitted people together—­an estimable office in a land where your house is so grievously your castle.

“What the devil have you got in you now?” Jonathan cried out to him.

Mr. Sedgett was seized by his complaint and demanded commiseration, but, recovering, he chuckled again.

“Oh, Bob Eccles!  Don’t you never grow older?  And the first day down among us again, too.  Why, Bob, as a military man, you ought to acknowledge your superiors.  Why, Stephen Bilton, the huntsman, says, Bob, you pulled the young gentleman off his horse—­you on foot, and him mounted.  I’d ha’ given pounds to be there.  And ladies present!  Lord help us!  I’m glad you’re returned, though.  These melons of the farmer’s, they’re a wonderful invention; people are speaking of ’em right and left, and says, says they, Farmer Eccles, he’s best farmer going—­Hampshire ought to be proud of him—­he’s worth two of any others:  that they are fine ones!  And you’re come back to keep ’em up, eh, Bob?  Are ye, though, my man?”

“Well, here I am, Mr. Sedgett,” said Robert, “and talking to my father.”

“Oh!  I wouldn’t be here to interrupt ye for the world.”  Mr. Sedgett made a show of retiring, but Jonathan insisted upon his disburdening himself of his tale, saying:  “Damn your raw beginnings, Sedgett!  What’s been up?  Nobody can hurt me.”

“That they can’t, neighbour; nor Bob neither, as far as stand up man to man go.  I give him three to one—­Bob Eccles!  He took ’em when a boy.  He may, you know, he may have the law agin him, and by George! if he do—­why, a man’s no match for the law.  No use bein’ a hero to the law.  The law masters every man alive; and there’s law in everything, neighbour Eccles; eh, sir?  Your friend, the Prince, owns to it, as much as you or me.  But, of course, you know what Bob’s been doing.  What I dropped in to ask was, why did ye do it, Bob?  Why pull the young gentleman off his horse?  I’d ha’ given pounds to be there!”

“Pounds o’ tallow candles don’t amount to much,” quoth Robert.

“That’s awful bad brandy at ‘The Pilot,’” said Mr. Sedgett, venomously.