The ferry could very well mind itself for a while, he said; and if
anyone should come along they must just hold hands with patience till he
got back, that was all. But passengers were few and far between this time
of year and of day. The "season"--as was the new-fangled fashion to call
it--being now over; trippers tripped home again to wheresoever their
natural habitat might be. The activities of boys' schools, picnic
parties, ambulant scientific societies and field-clubs--out in pursuit of
weeds, of stone-cracking, and the desecration of those old heathen
burying barrows on Stone Horse Head quieted off for the time being.
Deadham, meanwhile, in act of repossessing its soul in peace and
hibernating according to time-honoured habit until the vernal equinox.

Not that he, Jennifer, as he explained, owned to any quarrel with the
alien invasion. Good for trade they were, that tripper lot, though
wonnerful simple, he must say, when they came to talk, blessed with an
almighty wide swallow for any long-eared fairy tale you liked to put on
them. Mortal full of senseless questions, too, fit to make anybody
laugh!--Whereat overcome by joyous memories of human folly, he opened the
red cavern of his apparently toothless mouth, barking up audible mirth,
brief and husky, from the depth of a beer-slaked throat.

He leaned forward while speaking, resting chest and elbows on the
oars--only now and again dipping the blades in the water to steady the
boat in its course as it moved smoothly onward borne by brimming stream
and tide. From out the shadow of his thimble-crowned hat he looked up
knowingly, with the freemasonry of assured good-temper at Tom, who stood
before him hands in pockets, friendly and debonair, class distinctions
for the moment quite forgot. For, let alone immediate convenience of
chaperonage, the young man found unexpected entertainment in this typical
South Saxon, relic, as it struck him, of a bygone age and social order.