"Hallo!" Dennis shouted.
"What do you hallo for?" spoke the man; "don't you never come to a
churchyard to git yer sins forgive?"
"No," said the terrapin-finder, "not till I knows I has some sins."
"What air you prowlin' about the church then fur, anyhow?" demanded the
stranger, standing up in his boots, into which his trousers were tucked;
and he stood such a straight, long-limbed, lithe giant of a man that
Levin saw he could never run away, even if the intruder meant to chew
him up right there.
"I ain't a prowlin', friend," answered Levin Dennis. "I was jess a
lookin'."
"Lookin' fur what, fur which, fur who?" said the man, taking a step
towards Dennis, who felt himself to be no bigger than one of the other's
long, ditch-leaping, good-for-wading legs.
"Why, I was jess a follerin' a man--that is, friend, not 'zackly a man,
but a hat."
"A hat?" The man walked up to Dennis this time, and stood over him like
a pine-tree over a sucker. "Yer's yer hat," pulling an old straw
article, over-worn, from Dennis's head. "No wind's a blowin' to blow
hats into graveyards. Or did you set yer hat under a hen in yere, by a
stiffy?"
Dennis looked up, laughing, though not all at ease, but his amiable want
of either intelligence or fear, which belong near together, made his
most natural reply to the pertinacious intruder a disarming grin.
"No, man," Dennis said, "it was a hat on a man's head--ole Meshach
Milburn's steeple-top.
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