figures, and he showed my sister how, in a good few ways she was spending
money to poor purpose. He turned out to be a very clean man and very well
behaved. He didn't make trouble, but was all the other way, and when the
snow thawed, he was as busy as a bee helping the men round about the farm.
He made his head save his heels, too, and was full of devices and
inventions.

So when I got over after the worst was past, to see how they'd come
through it, there was Bob Battle working with the others; and when I
looked him up and down and said; "Who be you then?" he explained, and told
me how Mary had took him in out of the storm and let him lie in the
linhay; and how Noah had given him a suit of old clothes, and how much he
was beholden to them all. And they all had a good word for the man, and
Mary fairly simpered, so I thought, when she talked about him. There was
no immediate mention of his going, and when I asked my sister about it,
she said:

"Plenty of time. No doubt he'll get about his business in a day or two."

But, of course, he hadn't no business to get about, and though he talked
in a vague sort of way concerning his home in Exeter and a brother up to
Salisbury, it was all rubbish as he afterwards admitted. He was a tramp,
and nothing more, and the life at Little Sherberton and the good food and
the warm lying at nights, evidently took his fancy. So he stuck to it, and
such was his natural cleverness and his power of being in the right place
at the right moment that from the first nobody wished him away. He was
always talking of going, and it was always next Monday morning that he
meant to start: but the time went by and Bob Battle didn't. A very cunning
man and must have been in farming some time of his life, for he knew a
lot, and all worth knowing, and I'm not going to deny that he was useful