natural growth and offices. A veil of snowy white had been given by God to that little toothless mouth and to the stringy wrinkles of that repulsive chin and throat, and yet with the cost perpetual, and pains daily and vexatious, Nature's unceasing effort to put it on were resisted!
"A bit and a glass of summat" had preceded me, and my visitor was lively and talkative. His hearing and sight were apparently as good as ever, and in quickness of reply he certainly excelled most men, young or old, of his class of life. I began conversation rather jokingly, but he was soon "down upon me," as my neighbor said, "like a thousand of brick." Hilarity and imperturbable good-nature seemed to have constant possession of him. He had no reserves. Some allusion was made to his favoring one leg more than the other in his movements; and he ascribed it to a rheumatism, got by sleeping "out on the road the other night" (in November) "after a glass too much." He said he knocked at all the doors as he went along, and asked for a night's lodging, and they "passed him on" with their "no room, go to the next house!" till he was tired. So he lay down under a wall; and "it wouldn't have hurt him, if it hadn't sprung up cold in the night, and froze!" In this homeless habit of wandering, as in the making of baskets, which is his resource, when he can find nothing better to do, he seemed to show gipsy blood.
The questions we naturally put to him concerning General
