The following day I took no ride.  The weather was so beautiful it seemed better to spend the time sitting or basking in the warmth and brightness or strolling about.  At all events, it was a perfect day at Hurstbourne Tarrant, though not everywhere, for on that third of November the greatest portion of Southern England was drowned in a cold dense white fog.  In London it was dark, I heard.  Early in the morning I listened to a cirl-bunting singing merrily from a bush close to the George and Dragon Inn.  This charming bird is quite common in the neighbourhood, although, as elsewhere in England, the natives know it not by its book name, nor by any other, and do not distinguish it from its less engaging cousin, the yellowhammer.

After breakfast I strolled about the common and in Doles Wood, on the down above the village, listening to the birds, and on my way back encountered a tramp whose singular appearance produced a deep impression on my mind.  We have heard of a work by some modest pressman entitled “Monarchs I have met”, and I sometimes think that one equally interesting might be written on “Tramps I have met”.  As I have neither time nor stomach for the task, I will make a present of the title to any one of my fellow-travellers, curious in tramps, who cares to use it.  This makes two good titles I have given away in this chapter with a borrowed one.

But if it had been possible for me to write such a book, a prominent place would be given in it to the one tramp I have met who could be accurately described as gorgeous.  I did not cultivate his acquaintance; chance threw us together and we separated after exchanging a few polite commonplaces, but his big flamboyant image remains vividly impressed on my mind.

At noon, in the brilliant sunshine, as I came loiteringly down the long slope from Doles Wood to the village, he overtook me.  He was a huge man, over six feet high, nobly built, suggesting a Scandinavian origin, with a broad blond face, good features, and prominent blue eyes, and his hair was curly and shone like gold in the sunlight.  Had he been a mere labourer in a workman’s rough clay-stained clothes, one would have stood still to look at and admire him, and say perhaps what a magnificent warrior he would have looked with sword and spear and plumed helmet, mounted on a big horse!  But alas! he had the stamp of the irreclaimable blackguard on his face; and that same handsome face was just then disfigured with several bruises in three colours—­blue, black, and red.  Doubtless he had been in a drunken brawl on the previous evening and had perhaps been thrown out of some low public-house and properly punished.

In his dress he was as remarkable as in his figure.  Bright blue trousers much too small for his stout legs, once the property, no doubt, of some sporting young gent of loud tastes in colours; a spotted fancy waistcoat, not long enough to meet the trousers, a dirty scarlet tie, long black frock-coat, shiny in places, and a small dirty grey cap which only covered the topmost part of his head of golden hair.