The reddleman lived like a gipsy; but gipsies he scorned.  He was about as thriving as travelling basket and mat makers; but he had nothing to do with them.  He was more decently born and brought up than the cattle-drovers who passed and repassed him in his wanderings; but they merely nodded to him.  His stock was more valuable than that of pedlars; but they did not think so, and passed his cart with eyes straight ahead.  He was such an unnatural colour to look at that the men of round-abouts and wax-work shows seemed gentlemen beside him; but he considered them low company, and remained aloof.  Among all these squatters and folks of the road the reddleman continually found himself; yet he was not of them.  His occupation tended to isolate him, and isolated he was mostly seen to be.

It was sometimes suggested that reddlemen were criminals for whose misdeeds other men had wrongfully suffered:  that in escaping the law they had not escaped their own consciences, and had taken to the trade as a lifelong penance.  Else why should they have chosen it?  In the present case such a question would have been particularly apposite.  The reddleman who had entered Egdon that afternoon was an instance of the pleasing being wasted to form the ground-work of the singular, when an ugly foundation would have done just as well for that purpose.  The one point that was forbidding about this reddleman was his colour.  Freed from that he would have been as agreeable a specimen of rustic manhood as one would often see.  A keen observer might have been inclined to think—­which was, indeed, partly the truth—­that he had relinquished his proper station in life for want of interest in it.  Moreover, after looking at him one would have hazarded the guess that good-nature, and an acuteness as extreme as it could be without verging on craft, formed the frame-work of his character.

While he darned the stocking his face became rigid with thought.  Softer expressions followed this, and then again recurred the tender sadness which had sat upon him during his drive along the highway that afternoon.  Presently his needle stopped.  He laid down the stocking, arose from his seat, and took a leather pouch from a hook in the corner of the van.  This contained among other articles a brown-paper packet, which, to judge from the hinge-like character of its worn folds, seemed to have been carefully opened and closed a good many times.  He sat down on a three-legged milking stool that formed the only seat in the van, and, examining his packet by the light of a candle, took thence an old letter and spread it open.  The writing had originally been traced on white paper, but the letter had now assumed a pale red tinge from the accident of its situation; and the black strokes of writing thereon looked like the twigs of a winter hedge against a vermilion sunset.  The letter bore a date some two years previous to that time, and was signed “Thomasin Yeobright.”  It ran as follows:—­