These bye-roads, of which there are so many along the Somersetshire coast, are often very lonely,--they are dangerous to traffic, as no two ordinary sized vehicles can pass each other conveniently within so narrow a compass,--and in summer especially they are haunted by gypsies, "pea-pickers," and ill-favoured men and women of the "tramp" species, slouching along across country from Bristol to Minehead, and so over Countisbury Hill into Devon.

One such questionable-looking individual there was, who,--in a golden afternoon of July, when the sun was beginning to decline towards the west,--paused in his slow march through the dust, which even in the greenest of hill and woodland ways is bound to accumulate thickly after a fortnight's lack of rain,--and with a sigh of fatigue, sat down at the foot of a tree to rest.

He was an old man, with a thin weary face which was rendered more gaunt and haggard-looking by a ragged grey moustache and ugly stubble beard of some ten days' growth, and his attire suggested that he might possibly be a labourer dismissed from farm work for the heinous crime of old age, and therefore "on the tramp" looking out for a job.

He wore a soft slouched felt hat, very much out of shape and weather-stained,--and when he had been seated for a few minutes in a kind of apathy of lassitude, he lifted the hat off, passing his hand through his abundant rough white hair in a slow tired way, as though by this movement he sought to soothe some teasing pain.
"I think," he murmured, addressing himself to a tiny brown bird which had alighted on a branch of briar-rose hard by, and was looking at him with bold and lively inquisitiveness,--"I think I have managed the whole thing very well! I have left no clue anywhere.

My portmanteau will tell no tales, locked up in the cloak-room at Bristol.