"Yes, _rather_----!" said Selby a little awkwardly, and shook hands, conscious of more than a slight compunction for his hastiness in judgment of this mild divine. "Good-night, sir," and stood looking after him till he disappeared along the road into the luminous summer night.
Selby had finished breakfast, and was leaning over the pig-sty wall watching his host ministering to the fat sow and her squealing litter, when his acquaintance of the previous night appeared. Seen in the broad daylight he was an elderly man, short and spare, with placid blue eyes, and a singularly winning smile. A bachelor, so the inn-keeper had instructed Selby; a man of learning and of no small wealth, who, moreover, dressed and threw as pretty a fly as any in the county.
He saluted Selby with a little gesture of his ash-plant, inquired after the blistered heel, and then after an ailing member of the fat sow's litter. "And now, if you are ready and still of the same mind, shall we be strolling along?" he inquired.
Selby fetched his stick, and together they set out along a road made aromatic in the morning sunlight by the scents of dust and flowering hedgerow. Half a mile beyond the village the rector stopped before a gate-way. A dogcart and cob stood at the roadside, and a small boy in charge touched his cap.
"The Doctor is here, I see," said the clergyman, and opened the gate in the hedge. Selby caught a glimpse of a flagged path leading through an orchard to a whitewashed cottage. But his attention from the outset had been arrested by a most extraordinary assortment of crockery, glass and earthenware vases, busts, statuettes, and odds and ends of ironwork that occupied every available inch of space round the gateway, bordering the path, and were even cemented on to the front of the house itself. Above the gateway a defaced lion faced an equally mutilated unicorn across the Royal Arms of England. Arranged beneath, cemented into the pillars of the arch, were busts of Napoleon, Irving, Stanley, and George Washington; an earthenware jar bearing the inscription, "HOT POT"; a little group representing Leda and the Swan in white marble; and a grinning soapstone joss, such as is sold to tourists and sailors at ports on the China coast. Interspersed with these were cups without handles, segments of soup-plates, china dolls'-heads, lead soldiers, and a miscellaneous collection of tea-pot spouts, ... all firmly plastered into the ironwork of the pillars.