[Echelog-devel] , let me humbly suggest to gentle reader

[Pluid <lo...@31...>]

 CHAPTER IX. THE POACHER. A sudden knock at the door here startled the
whole party, and Mary Acton, bustling up, drew the bolt to let
in--first, a lurcher, one Rover to wit, our gaunt ember-loving friend of
Chapter II.; secondly, Thomas Acton, full flush, who carried the old
musket on his shoulder, and seemed to have something else under his
smock; and thirdly, Ben Burke, a personage of no small consequence to
us, and who therefore deserves some specific introduction. Big Ben,
otherwise Black Burke, according to the friendship or the enmity of
those who named him, was a huge, rough, loud, good-humoured, dare-devil
sort of an individual, who lived upon what he considered common rights.
His dress was of the mongrel character, a well-imagined cross between a
ploughman's and a sailor's; the bottle-green frock of the former,
pattern-stitched about the neck as ingeniously as if a tribe of
Wisconsin squaws had tailored it--and mighty fishing boots, vast as any
French postillion's, acting as a triton's tail to symbolize the latter:
a red cotton handkerchief (dirty-red of course, as all things else were
dirty, for cleanliness had little part in Ben), occupied just now the
more native region of a halter; and a rusty fur cap crowned the poacher;
I repeat it--crowned the poacher; for in his own estimation, and that of
many others too