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Words: 40907 in 30 pages
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PLEASANT RECEPTIONS.
"Ax."
"I was asking, or axing, as you call it, my man. I said, Is that Dumford, down there in the valley?"
"And I said axe, or arks, as you call it, my man," was the surly, defiant reply.
The last speaker looked up savagely from the block of stone on which he was seated, and the questioner looked down from where he stood on the rough track. There was a quiet, half-amused twinkle in his clear grey eyes, which did not quit his verbal opponent for an instant, as he remained gazing at him without speaking.
The seated man, who was smoking a very dirty and short clay pipe, was as broad-shouldered, as sturdy, and as well-knit; but while the one, in spite of a somewhat heavy build, was, so to speak, polished by exercise into grace; the other was rough and angular, and smirched as his countenance was by sweat and the grime of some manufacturing trade, he looked as brutal as his words.
"What are yow lookin' at?" he suddenly growled menacingly.
"At yow," said the clergyman, in the most unruffled way; and, letting his bag and stick fall in the ferns, he coolly seated himself on a second block of stone on the bright hill-side.
"Now look here," exclaimed the workman, roughly, "I know what you're after. You're going to call me my friend, and finish off with giving me a track, and you may just save yerself the trouble, for it wean't do."
He knocked the ashes out of his pipe as he spoke, and looked menacing enough to do any amount of mischief to a man he did not like.
"You're wrong," said the traveller, coolly, as he rummaged in the pocket of his long black coat. "I'm going to have a pipe."
He opened a case, took out a well-blackened meerschaum, scraped the ashes from its interior, filled it from a large india-rubber pouch which he then passed to the workman, before striking a match from a little brass box and beginning to smoke with his hands clasped round his knees.
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