This makes two good titles I have given away in
this chapter with a borrowed one.
But if it had been possible for me to write such a book, a
prominent place would be given in it to the one tramp I have
met who could be accurately described as gorgeous. I did not
cultivate his acquaintance; chance threw us together and we
separated after exchanging a few polite commonplaces, but his
big flamboyant image remains vividly impressed on my mind.
At noon, in the brilliant sunshine, as I came loiteringly down
the long slope from Doles Wood to the village, he overtook me.
He was a huge man, over six feet high, nobly built, suggesting
a Scandinavian origin, with a broad blond face, good features,
and prominent blue eyes, and his hair was curly and shone like
gold in the sunlight. Had he been a mere labourer in a
workman's rough clay-stained clothes, one would have stood
still to look at and admire him, and say perhaps what a
magnificent warrior he would have looked with sword and spear
and plumed helmet, mounted on a big horse! But alas! he had
the stamp of the irreclaimable blackguard on his face; and
that same handsome face was just then disfigured with several
bruises in three colours - blue, black, and red. Doubtless he
had been in a drunken brawl on the previous evening and had
perhaps been thrown out of some low public-house and properly
punished.
In his dress he was as remarkable as in his figure. Bright
blue trousers much too small for his stout legs, once the
property, no doubt, of some sporting young gent of loud tastes
in colours; a spotted fancy waistcoat, not long enough to meet
the trousers, a dirty scarlet tie, long black frock-coat,
shiny in places, and a small dirty grey cap which only covered
the topmost part of his head of golden hair.
Walking by the hedge-side he picked and devoured the late
blackberries, which were still abundant. It was a beautiful
unkept hedge with scarlet and purple fruit among the
many-coloured fading leaves and silver-grey down of old-man's-
beard.
I too picked and ate a few berries and made the remark that it
was late to eat such fruit in November. The Devil in these
parts, I told him, flies abroad in October to spit on the
bramble bushes and spoil the fruit. It was even worse further
north, in Norfolk and Suffolk, where they say the Devil goes
out at Michaelmas and shakes his verminous trousers over the
bushes.
He didn't smile; he went on sternly eating blackberries, and
then remarked in a bitter tone, "That Devil they talk about
must have a busy time, to go messing about blackberry bushes
in addition to all his other important work."
I was silent, and presently, after swallowing a few more
berries, he resumed in the same tone:
