reddleman is coming for you!" had been the formulated threat of Wessex
mothers for many generations. He was successfully supplanted for a
while, at the beginning of the present century, by Buonaparte; but as
process of time rendered the latter personage stale and ineffective the
older phrase resumed its early prominence. And now the reddleman has
in his turn followed Buonaparte to the land of worn-out bogeys, and his
place is filled by modern inventions.

The reddleman lived like a gipsy; but gipsies he scorned. He was about
as thriving as travelling basket and mat makers; but he had nothing
to do with them. He was more decently born and brought up than the
cattledrovers who passed and repassed him in his wanderings; but they
merely nodded to him. His stock was more valuable than that of pedlars;
but they did not think so, and passed his cart with eyes straight ahead.
He was such an unnatural colour to look at that the men of roundabouts
and waxwork 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 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