"Cripps, it took me a very long time to warm him up to the matter again, after that great disappointment. He was burning for some great suit at law against some rival nursery, which always pays the upstart one; but I led him round, and by patient words and simple truth brought him back to reason. The packing of the bag he remembered well, and the pouring of a lot of buck-wheat husks around and among the potato sets, to keep them from bruising, and to keep out frost, which seemed even then to be in the air. And he sent his best man to the Oxford coach, the first down coach from London, which passed by their gate about ten o'clock, and would be in Oxford about two, with the weather and the roads as usual. In that case, the bag could scarcely have been at the Black Horse more than half an hour before you came and laid hold of it; and being put into the bar, as the Squire's parcels always are, it was very unlikely to be tampered with."
"Lord a' mercy! your Worship, it was witchcraft then! The same as I said all along; it were witches' craft, and nothing else."
"Stop, Cripps, don't you be in such a hurry. But wait till you hear what I have next to tell. But oh, here comes my friend Hardenow, as punctual as the clock strikes two! Well, old fellow, how are you getting on?"
The Rev. Thomas Hardenow, fellow and tutor of Brasenose, strode into his own room at full speed, and stopped abruptly at sight of the Carrier. "Of all men, most I have avoided thee," was in his mind; but he spoke it not, though being a strongly outspoken man. Not that he ever had done any wrong to make him be shy of the Cripps race; but that he felt in his heart a desire for commune, which must be dangerous. He knew that in him lurked a foolish tendency towards Esther; and (which was worse) he knew that she had done her best to overcome a still more foolish turn towards him.
Cripps, however (who would have fed the doves of Venus on black peas), looked upon any little bygone "coorting" as a social and congenial topic, enabling a quiet man to get on (if he only had a good memory) with almost any woman. Like a sensible man, he had always acquitted Hardenow of any blame in the matter, knowing that young girls' fancies may be caught without any angling. "If her chose to be a fool, how were he to blame for it?" And the Carrier never forgot the stages of social distinction. "Servant, sir," he therefore said, with his usual salaam; "hope I see you well, sir."