CHAPTER II.
A PUBLICAN, A SINNER, AND A STRANGER "Ah, Don Alphonso, is it you?
Agreeable accident! Chance presents you to my eyes where you were least expected." Gil Blas.
It was an evening in the beginning of summer, and Peter Dealtry and the ci-devant Corporal sate beneath the sign of The Spotted Dog (as it hung motionless from the bough of a friendly elm), quaffing a cup of boon companionship.

The reader will imagine the two men very different from each other in form and aspect; the one short, dry, fragile, and betraying a love of ease in his unbuttoned vest, and a certain lolling, see-sawing method of balancing his body upon his chair; the other, erect and solemn, and as steady on his seat as if he were nailed to it.

It was a fine, tranquil balmy evening; the sun had just set, and the clouds still retained the rosy tints which they had caught from his parting ray.

Here and there, at scattered intervals, you might see the cottages peeping from the trees around them; or mark the smoke that rose from their roofs--roofs green with mosses and house-leek,--in graceful and spiral curls against the clear soft air.

It was an English scene, and the two men, the dog at their feet, (for Peter Dealtry favoured a wirey stone-coloured cur, which he called a terrier,) and just at the door of the little inn, two old gossips, loitering on the threshold in familiar chat with the landlady, in cap and kerchief,--all together made a groupe equally English, and somewhat picturesque, though homely enough, in effect.
"Well, now," said Peter Dealtry, as he pushed the brown jug towards the Corporal, "this is what I call pleasant; it puts me in mind--" "Of what ?" quoth the Corporal.
"Of those nice lines in the hymn, Master Bunting.
'How fair ye are, ye little hills, Ye little fields also; Ye murmuring streams that sweetly run; Ye willows in a row!' "There is something very comfortable in sacred verses, Master Bunting; but you're a scoffer." "Psha, man!" said the Corporal, throwing out his right leg and leaning back, with his eyes half-shut, and his chin protruded, as he took an unusually long inhalation from his pipe; "Psha, man!--send verses to the right-about--fit for girls going to school of a Sunday; full-grown men more up to snuff.