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After this warning, the old man turned into the first open door, and we crossed over to the wheelwright's shop; and as the wheel would not be finished for several hours yet, we continued our survey of the town, and our next landing was at The Buffalo Bull.
It had a tall door of solid oak studded with iron nails; but this was unlocked and unbolted, and I knew the yard to be vacant, for the French farriers had requisitioned all the wheelwright's tools three days before, and the honest man had taken to his bed and proposed to stay there pending compensation.
When he arrived at the wheelwright's shop at Chatres, the Emperor, as we have just seen, was abandoning himself to most brilliant dreams; which circumstance was most unfortunate for M. de Saint-Aignan, since he was the bearer of disagreeable news.
Presently there were signs of habitation. A curl of smoke from a low roof so lost in its orchard that but for that domestic flag it might have escaped observation altogether; a triangular green with a pond, geese and pigs; more thatched cottages, gardens, small fields, large hedges, high, bushy, unpruned; hedgerow trees; a lonely little chapel in a burial-ground, a woodyard, a wheelwright's shop, a guide-post pointing three ways, a blacksmith's forge at one side of the road, and an old inn opposite; cows, unkempt children; white gates, gravelled drives, chimney-pots of gentility, hidden away in bowers of foliage.
This was Mrs. Winthrop, the wheelwright's wife. The inhabitants of Raveloe were not severely regular in their church-going, and perhaps there was hardly a person in the parish who would not have held that to go to church every Sunday in the calendar would have shown a greedy desire to stand well with Heaven, and get an undue advantage over their neighbours a wish to be better than the "common run", that would have implied a reflection on those who had had godfathers and godmothers as well as themselves, and had an equal right to the burying-service.
There was nothing else to be done; and as the bonfire was kept blazing the punt was hauled up, and in the midst of the howling wind and the rush of the water Dick stood looking on, his heart full as he thought of Tom Tallington asking his help away there in the darkness; while tap, tap, tap went the wheelwright's hammer, after his saw had rasped off a thin piece of board.
A reckless spirit of determination had come over him, and he was ready to do anything, dare anything; but all the same the wheelwright's words troubled him, and he could not master the feeling that it would be painful for the constant repetition to come to his mother's knowledge, till even she began to think that there must be some truth in the matter, and he would not be there to defend himself.
The wheelwright shook his head and looked round uneasily, as if he too felt the influence of coming danger; but no puff of smoke came from clump of bushes or patch of reeds; no sharp report rose from the alders that fringed part of the walk, and they reached the wheelwright's cottage without adventure.
The front room below had been Wheelwright's workshop, and the family lived in the room back of it. Both looked as though they had been swept and garnished by the hand of Famine herself. Not a single article of furniture, of any description, was left!
Tom first reconnoitred the wheelwright's shop; and seeing no signs of activity, thought all safe in that quarter, and ordered at once an advance of all his troops upon the schoolporch. The door of the school was ajar, and the boys seated on the nearest bench at once recognized and opened a correspondence with the invaders.
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