For a whole week the brain concealed in Mr. Grummit’s bullet-shaped head worked in vain, and his temper got correspondingly bad.  The day after the Evans’ arrival he had found his yard littered with tins which he recognized as old acquaintances, and since that time they had travelled backwards and forwards with monotonous regularity.  They sometimes made as many as three journeys a day, and on one occasion the heavens opened to drop a battered tin bucket on the back of Mr. Grummit as he was tying his bootlace.  Five minutes later he spoke of the outrage to Mr. Evans, who had come out to admire the sunset.

“I heard something fall,” said the constable, eyeing the pail curiously.

“You threw it,” said Mr. Grummit, breathing furiously.

“Me?  Nonsense,” said the other, easily.  “I was having tea in the parlour with my wife and my mother-in-law, and my brother Joe and his young lady.”

“Any more of ’em?” demanded the hapless Mr. Grummit, aghast at this list of witnesses for an alibi.

“It ain’t a bad pail, if you look at it properly,” said the constable.  “I should keep it if I was you; unless the owner offers a reward for it.  It’ll hold enough water for your wants.”

Mr. Grummit flung indoors and, after wasting some time concocting impossible measures of retaliation with his sympathetic partner, went off to discuss affairs with his intimates at the Bricklayers’ Arms.  The company, although unanimously agreeing that Mr. Evans ought to be boiled, were miserably deficient in ideas as to the means by which such a desirable end was to be attained.

“Make ’im a laughing-stock, that’s the best thing,” said an elderly labourer.  “The police don’t like being laughed at.”

“’Ow?” demanded Mr. Grummit, with some asperity.

“There’s plenty o’ ways,” said the old man.

“I should find ’em out fast enough if I ’ad a bucket dropped on my back, I know.”

Mr. Grummit made a retort the feebleness of which was somewhat balanced by its ferocity, and subsided into glum silence.  His back still ached, but, despite that aid to intellectual effort, the only ways he could imagine of making the constable look foolish contained an almost certain risk of hard labour for himself.

He pondered the question for a week, and meanwhile the tins—­to the secret disappointment of Mr. Evans—­remained untouched in his yard.  For the whole of the time he went about looking, as Mrs. Grummit expressed it, as though his dinner had disagreed with him.

“I’ve been talking to old Bill Smith,” he said, suddenly, as he came in one night.

Mrs. Grummit looked up, and noticed with wifely pleasure that he was looking almost cheerful.

“He’s given me a tip,” said Mr. Grummit, with a faint smile; “a copper mustn’t come into a free-born Englishman’s ’ouse unless he’s invited.”

“Wot of it?” inquired his wife.  “You wasn’t think of asking him in, was you?”