“To be sure, Joshua, to be sure, they shall have it.  I’ll ride round to Adam myself, and see him.  Send your boy, however, to say they shall have the grave, lest anything should happen to detain me.  And now, good morning, Joshua; go into the kitchen and have some ale.”

“Poor old Thias!” said Mr. Irwine, when Joshua was gone.  “I’m afraid the drink helped the brook to drown him.  I should have been glad for the load to have been taken off my friend Adam’s shoulders in a less painful way.  That fine fellow has been propping up his father from ruin for the last five or six years.”

“He’s a regular trump, is Adam,” said Captain Donnithorne.  “When I was a little fellow, and Adam was a strapping lad of fifteen, and taught me carpentering, I used to think if ever I was a rich sultan, I would make Adam my grand-vizier.  And I believe now he would bear the exaltation as well as any poor wise man in an Eastern story.  If ever I live to be a large-acred man instead of a poor devil with a mortgaged allowance of pocket-money, I’ll have Adam for my right hand.  He shall manage my woods for me, for he seems to have a better notion of those things than any man I ever met with; and I know he would make twice the money of them that my grandfather does, with that miserable old Satchell to manage, who understands no more about timber than an old carp.  I’ve mentioned the subject to my grandfather once or twice, but for some reason or other he has a dislike to Adam, and I can do nothing.  But come, Your Reverence, are you for a ride with me?  It’s splendid out of doors now.  We can go to Adam’s together, if you like; but I want to call at the Hall Farm on my way, to look at the whelps Poyser is keeping for me.”

“You must stay and have lunch first, Arthur,” said Mrs. Irwine.  “It’s nearly two.  Carroll will bring it in directly.”

“I want to go to the Hall Farm too,” said Mr. Irwine, “to have another look at the little Methodist who is staying there.  Joshua tells me she was preaching on the Green last night.”

“Oh, by Jove!” said Captain Donnithorne, laughing.  “Why, she looks as quiet as a mouse.  There’s something rather striking about her, though.  I positively felt quite bashful the first time I saw her—­she was sitting stooping over her sewing in the sunshine outside the house, when I rode up and called out, without noticing that she was a stranger, ’Is Martin Poyser at home?’ I declare, when she got up and looked at me and just said, ‘He’s in the house, I believe:  I’ll go and call him,’ I felt quite ashamed of having spoken so abruptly to her.  She looked like St. Catherine in a Quaker dress.  It’s a type of face one rarely sees among our common people.”

“I should like to see the young woman, Dauphin,” said Mrs. Irwine.  “Make her come here on some pretext or other.”