“Touch then!”

They joined hands, and the man sat down on the heap of stones.

“No dinner?”

“Nothing but supper now,” said the mender of roads, with a

hungry face.

“It is the fashion,” growled the man. “I meet no dinner

anywhere.”

He took out a blackened pipe, filled it, lighted it with flint and

steel, pulled at it until it was in a bright glow: then, suddenly held

it from him and dropped something into it from between his finger

and thumb, that blazed and went out in a puff of smoke.

“Touch then.” It was the turn of the mender of roads to say it

this time, after observing these operations. They again joined

hands.

“Tonight?” said the mender of roads.

“Tonight,” said the man, putting the pipe in his mouth.

“Where?”

“Here.”

He and the mender of roads sat on the heap of stones looking

silently at one another, with the hail driving in between them like

Charles Dickens ElecBook Classics

a pigmy charge of bayonets, until the sky began to clear over the

village.

“Show me!” said the traveller then, moving to the brow of the

hill.

“See!” returned the mender of roads, with extended finger.

“You go down here, and straight through the street, and past the

fountain”

“To the Devil with all that!” interrupted the other, rolling his

eye over the landscape. “I go through no streets and past no

fountains. Well?”

“Well! About two leagues beyond the summit of that hill above

the village.”

“Good. When do you cease to work?”

“At sunset.”

“Will you wake me before departing? I have walked two nights

without resting. Let me finish my pipe, and I shall sleep like a

child. Will you wake me?”

“Surely.”

The wayfarer smoked his pipe out, put it in his breast, slipped

off his great wooden shoes, and lay down on his back on the heap

of stones. He was fast asleep directly.

As the road mender plied his dusty labour, and the hail-clouds,

rolling away, revealed bright bars and streaks of sky which were

responded to by silver gleams upon the landscape, the little man

(who wore a red cap now, in place of his blue one) seemed

fascinated by the figure on the heap of stones. His eyes were so

often turned towards it, that he used his tools mechanically, and,

one would have said, to very poor account. The bronze face, the

shaggy black hair and beard, the coarse woollen red cap, the