Now as I sat, feeling strangely lonely and disconsolate, I espied a
bulbous parcel lying in reach and, opening this, found it to contain a
small loaf, three slices of bacon and a piece of cheese, together with
a folded paper whereon I deciphered these words inscribed in painfully
neat characters.
YOUNG SIR:
What is one thing at night is another in the morning, so I have gone
my way and taken my course appointed. If you should wish to meet me
again, which would be strange, I think, you shall hear of me at the
White Hart nigh to Sevenoaks, or the Chequers at Tonbridge or from
mostly any of the padding kind, since the high road is my home and has
been long. I am glad you liked my verses, I have more I could have
read you and I think better of yours than you think I thought, though
you have taken Lord Byron for your model I think and he is only a poet
when he forgets to be a fine gentleman. May you prosper, young sir,
and find your manhood which I reckon is none so far to seek. And this
is the true desire of me.
Jeremiah Jarvis.
Tinker and occasionally literary cove.
I have left you some breakfast also fire to cook same, eat hearty. You
will find a frying-pan in a cleft of the tree we slept under.
Thereupon, being much more hungry than was my wont, I came to the tree
in question and presently found a roomy cleft where was the
frying-pan, sure enough. And now, having made up the fire, I set about
cooking my breakfast for the first time in my life and found it no
great business, turning the rashers this way and that in the pan until
what with their delectable sight and smell, my hunger grew to a
voracious desire that amazed me by its intensity.
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