Captain Salt, having given his instructions, retired, whistling cheerfully, to perform his toilet.
He was in the best of spirits, and broke now and again into snatches of song, which he trolled out in a tenor voice of great richness and flexibility.

Tristram listened in admiration on the other side of the partition.

The songs were those of Tom d'Urfey and his imitators, and dealt in a strain of easy sentimentality with hay-rakes, milking-pails and all the apparatus of a country life as etherealised by a cockney fancy; but the Captain sang with such a gusto, such bravura, and such an appealing tremolo in the pathetic passages, that you might have mistaken the splashing of water in his basin, as he broke off to wash his face, for tears of uncontrollable regret that he had not been born a "swain" (as he put it).

Suddenly, however, one of his roulades ceased with more abruptness than usual and the enchanted Tristram waited in vain for the ditty to be resumed.

The fact was that Captain Salt had glanced out of the window and seen at a stable door across the court a man stooping with his back to the inn and washing down the legs of a dark bay horse.
The Captain contemplated this group for a moment; then hastily donning his coat and turning into the parlour looked out upon the street.
Immediately under the signboard of the White Lamb, and before the front-door, stood a couple of men who chatted as they passed a tankard of beer to each other.