222 MASTER SKYLARK

and the men were eating and drinking and chatting to-
gether so gaily, and seemed to be all such good friends,
that it was a pleasant thing just to see them sitting there
in their comfortable leather-bottomed chairs, taking life
easily because the spring had come again.

One tall fellow was smoking a pipe. He held the bowl
in one hand, and kept tamping down the loose tobacco
with his forefinger. Now and again he would be so
eagerly talking he would forget that his finger was in the
bowl, and it would be burned. He would take it out with
a look of quaint surprise, whereat the rest all roared.
Another was a fat, round man who chuckled constantly
to himself, as if this life were all a joke; and there was a
quite severe, important-seeming, oldish man who said,
“Hem—hem!” from time to time, as if about to speak
forthwith, yet never spoke a word. There was also among
the rest a raw-boned, lanky fellow who had bitten the
heart out of an oat-cake and held the rim of it in his fingers
like anew moon, waving it around while he talked, until the
little man beside him popped it deftly out of his grasp and
ate it before the other saw where it was gone. But when
he made out what was become of that oat-cake he rose up
solemnly, took the little man by the collar as a huntsman
takes a pup, and laid him softly in the grass without a word.

What a laughing and going-on was then! It was as if
they all were growing young again. And in the middle
of the row a head popped over the quick-set hedge, and a
most stentorian voice called out, “ Here, here! Go slow—I
want a piece of that!”