Now Mordecai worked at the wardrobe of the farm, and, elevated upon his trestles, held a sort of conference, and told the things life taught him. Once during the dinner hour, several farm folk were at Mr. Cockey's feet, as he sat cross-legged amid his tools and ate his meal of bread and cheese. Meat he might have had in plenty, but he explained to Dinah Beer that his sedentary life had long since turned him vegetarian.
"By God's blessing I can stomach cheese," he said, "an' if so be as a body's humours will cope with vinnied cheese, he may hope for a long life."
"Be my breeches mended, Mister?" asked Tom Putt. "'Cause if so, I should like to don 'em afore afternoon. I've got a riding job as'll take me to Holne by-an'-by."
"They'm done. I've double-seated 'em for 'e."
"You'm always as good as your word, I'm sure," said Harvey Woodman, "though how them fat hands of yours--as look more like bunches of parsnips than hands--can do such finnicky work makes me wonder."
"Ah, I dare say a lot of things make you wonder," answered the tailor. "Not but what I envy you your way of life, for 'tis healthier'n mine. You chaps, as till the earth, have no time to fret your intellects like what I do. Ploughmen never band together and make trouble in the world. Tailors be a very thinking race; but you'll not find they takes a hopeful view of human nature."
"Then they'm small-minded," said Beer firmly; "for, looked at all round, human nature be a very hopeful thing."
"You may be in the right. Perhaps building of clothes do narrow the heart, for we grow apt to think 'tis our feathers make the birds. For that matter the world counts us but light. We'm slighted tradesmen, we tailors. They say it takes nine of us to make a man; though it only takes one to get a long family, as I know to my cost. Thirteen children have I, an' all with the tailoring spirit in 'em except my eldest son."
"An' what might he be doing?" asked Putt.
"That's just what it ban't," declared Mr. Cockey. "They'm sly as lawyers; an' there's a damned sight more in bread than corn nowadays. A man may be eating his own great gran'faither; as I've said openly down to Totnes, an' nobody contradicted me.
"God's word! They don't rob churchyards for their bones, do they?" asked Woodman. "If I thought that, I'd never take bit nor sup to Totnes no more."