Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: VIII WE have gone back a few steps in history to get a good beginning, as Dod does when he blows out his cheeks and runs backwards a hundred paces with intent to jump the sunk fence between his father's orchard and the paddock (though he does not always jump it then, but stops because his stocking is coming down, or because it is too hot for jumping: saying he can jump it if he likes, and mebbe he will jump it tomorrow if he thinks on). Fondie was but fourteen—or little turned—at the time of the wheelwright's historic breach with the Body. He was barely two years older when he designed and executed the great signboard. Before he was seventeen he had painted the public- house (unaided) two coats, and doctored up the tuberculous White Cow so skillfully that the farrier from Sproutgreen could not have put her into better fettle. Everybody that stopped outside the door said to the landlord: "Thoo's gotten a new coo then, Meggit!" and Meggit had to tell everybody: "Nay I en't. Yon's aud coo wi' a new coat. Fondie fittled her." To which the Sproutgreen pig-jobber retorted: "Aye, that she is, an' he's put 'er wi' calf an' all, Meggit"—a jest that served the bar and all Whiwle for a fortnight after, and brought the modest blush to Fondie's cheek when the district visited him. And because he was Fondie he never went once into the public bar all the while he was painting her, and when it came to the bar window he never even glanced inside, but kept his eyes glued to the brush and woodwork, as if his very soul depended on it, responding to the derisive voices that hailed him from within without transferring his gaze to the speakers. When Jerry Colman did the painting the time before he could not hear a voice or hiccough but he was down his ladder in a moment, and spent so much of his t...