 and wax-work shows seemed gentlemen beside
him; but he considered them low company, and remained aloof. Among all these
squatters and folks of the road the reddleman continually found himself; yet he
was not of them. His occupation tended to isolate him, and isolated he was
mostly seen to be.
    It was sometimes suggested that reddlemen were criminals for whose misdeeds
other men had wrongfully suffered: that in escaping the law they had not escaped
their own consciences, and had taken to the trade as a lifelong penance. Else
why should they have chosen it? In the present case such a question would have
been particularly apposite. The reddleman who had entered Egdon that afternoon
was an instance of the pleasing being wasted to form the ground-work of the
singular, when an ugly foundation would have done just as well for that purpose.
The one point that was forbidding about this reddleman was his colour. Freed
from that he would have been as agreeable a specimen of rustic manhood as one
would often see. A keen observer might have been inclined to think - which was,
indeed, partly the truth - that he had relinquished his proper station in life
for want of interest in it. Moreover, after looking at him one would have
hazarded the guess that good-nature, and an acuteness as extreme as it could be
without verging on craft, formed the frame-work of his character.
    While he darned the stocking his face became rigid with thought. Softer
expressions followed this, and then again recurred the tender sadness which had
sat upon him during his drive along the highway that afternoon. Presently his
needle stopped. He laid down the stocking, arose from his seat, and took a
leathern pouch from a hook in the corner of the van. This contained among other
articles a brown-paper packet, which, to judge from the hinge-like character of
its worn folds, seemed to have been carefully opened and closed a good many
times. He sat down on a three-legged milking-stool that formed the only seat in
the van, and, examining his packet by the light of a candle, took thence an old
letter and spread it open. The writing had originally been traced on white
paper, but the letter had now assumed a pale red tinge from the accident of its
situation; and the black strokes of writing thereon looked like the twigs of a
winter hedge against a vermilion sunset. The letter bore a date some two years
previous to that time, and was signed »Thomasin Yeobright.« It ran as follows: -
 
        Dear Diggory Venn, - The question
