Page:Dickens - A Child s History of England, 1900.djvu/781

Rh sensical piece of inconsistency, and I'm disgusted. I'm ashamed and disgusted!"

"I wish you would come and look at him," said Mr. Traveller, tapping the tinker on the shoulder.

"Not I, sir," he rejoined. "I ain't a-going to flatter him up, by looking at him I"

"But he is asleep."

"Are you sure he is asleep?" asked the tinker, with an unwilling air, as he shouldered his wallet.

"Sure."

"Then I'll look at him for a quarter of a minute," said the tinker, "since you so much wish it; but not a moment longer."

Then the three went back across the road; and through the barred window, by the dying glow of the sunset coming in at the gate—which the child held open for its admission—he could be pretty clearly discerned lying on his bed.

"You see him?" said Mr. Traveller.

"Yes," returned the tinker, "and he's worse than I thought him."

Mr. Traveller then whispered in a few words what he had done since morning; and asked the tinker what he thought of that?

"I think," returned the tinker, as he turned from the window, "that you've wasted a day on him."

"I think so, too; though not, I hope, upon myself. Do you happen to be going anywhere near the Peal of Bells?"

"That's my direct way, sir," said the tinker.

"I invite you to supper there. And as I learn from this young lady that she goes some three-quarters of a mile in the same direction, we will drop her on the road, and we will spare time to keep her company at her garden gate until her own Bella comes home."

So Mr. Traveller, and the child, and the tinker, went along very amicably in the sweet-scented evening; and the moral with which the tinker dismissed the subject was, that he said in his trade that metal that rotted for want of use, had better be left to rot, and couldn't rot too soon, considering how much true metal rotted from over-use and hard service.