Now, it so happened that one afternoon in October, when the periodical excursions of the anglers, becoming gradually rarer and more rare, had altogether ceased, Mr. Caleb Price was summoned from his parlour in which he had been employed in the fabrication of a net for his cabbages, by a little white-headed boy, who came to say there was a gentleman at the inn who wished immediately to see him--a strange gentleman, who had never been there before.
Mr. Price threw down his net, seized his hat, and, in less than five minutes, he was in the best room of the little inn.
The person there awaiting him was a man who, though plainly clad in a velveteen shooting-jacket, had an air and mien greatly above those common to the pedestrian visitors of A----. He was tall, and of one of those athletic forms in which vigour in youth is too often followed by corpulence in age. At this period, however, in the full prime of manhood--the ample chest and sinewy limbs, seen to full advantage in their simple and manly dress--could not fail to excite that popular admiration which is always given to strength in the one sex as to delicacy in the other. The stranger was walking impatiently to and fro the small apartment when Mr. Price entered; and then, turning to the clergyman a countenance handsome and striking, but yet more prepossessing from its expression of frankness than from the regularity of its features,--he stopped short, held out his hand, and said, with a gay laugh, as he glanced over the parson’s threadbare and slovenly costume, “My poor Caleb!--what a metamorphosis!--I should not have known you again!”
“What! you! Is it possible, my dear fellow?--how glad I am to see you! What on earth can bring you to such a place? No! not a soul would believe me if I said I had seen you in this miserable hole.”
“That is precisely the reason why I am here. Sit down, Caleb, and we’ll talk over matters as soon as our landlord has brought up the materials for--”
“The milk-punch,” interrupted Mr. Price, rubbing his hands.
“Ah, that will bring us back to old times, indeed!”
In a few minutes the punch was prepared, and after two or three preparatory glasses, the stranger thus commenced: “My dear Caleb, I am in want of your assistance, and above all of your secrecy.”