The table was spread with a red damask cloth, on which were a tray of raisins and nuts and a small rally of silver cups.  Above the table an apple-tree nodded its new leaves, and from an overhanging bough a lantern hung glowing like a great yellow bee.

There was a young fellow with a white apron and a jolly little whisper of a whistle on his puckered lips going around with a plate of cakes and a tray of honey-bowls; and the men were eating and drinking and chatting together so gaily, and seemed to be all such good friends, that it was a pleasant thing just to see them sitting there in their comfortable leather-bottomed chairs, taking life easily because the spring had come again.

One tall fellow was smoking a pipe.  He held the bowl in one hand, and kept tamping down the loose tobacco with his forefinger.  Now and again he would be so eagerly talking he would forget that his finger was in the bowl, and it would be burned.  He would take it out with a look of quaint surprise, whereat the rest all roared.  Another was a fat, round man who chuckled constantly to himself, as if this life were all a joke; and there was a quite severe, important-seeming, oldish man who said, “Hem—­hem!” from time to time, as if about to speak forthwith, yet never spoke a word.  There was also among the rest a raw-boned, lanky fellow who had bitten the heart out of an oat-cake and held the rim of it in his fingers like a new moon, waving it around while he talked, until the little man beside him popped it deftly out of his grasp and ate it before the other saw where it was gone.  But when he made out what was become of that oat-cake he rose up solemnly, took the little man by the collar as a huntsman takes a pup, and laid him softly in the grass without a word.

What a laughing and going-on was then!  It was as if they all were growing young again.  And in the middle of the row a head popped over the quick-set hedge, and a most stentorian voice called out, “Here, here!  Go slow—­I want a piece of that!”

They all looked up, and the moment they spied that laughing face and cloak of Holland cloth, raised a shout of “What, there!” “Well met!” “Come in, Ben.”  “Where hast thou tarried so long?” and the like; while the waiter ran to open the gate and let the stranger in.

A quiet man with a little chestnut-colored beard and hazel eyes, which lit up quickly at sight of the stranger over the hedge, arose from his place by the table and went down the path with hands outstretched to greet him.

“Welcome, welcome, hurly-burly Ben,” said he.  “We’ve missed thee from the feast.  Art well?  And what’s the good word?”

“Ah, Will, thou gentle rogue!” the other cried, catching the hands of the quiet man and holding him off while he looked at him there.  “How thou stealest one’s heart with the glance of thine eye!  I was going to give thee a piece of my mind; but a plague, old heart! who could chide thee to thy face?  Am I well?  Ay, exceedingly well.  And the news?  Jove! the best that was baked at the Queen’s to-day, and straight from the oven-door!  The thing is done—­huff, puff, and away we go!  But come on—­this needs telling to the rest.”