“Strange!” perhaps you will say, “this
rush of impulse to-wards a course that might have
seemed the most repugnant to her present state of mind,
and in only the second night of her sadness!”
Yes, the actions of a little trivial soul like Hetty’s,
struggling amidst the serious sad destinies of a human
being, are strange. So are the motions of a little
vessel without ballast tossed about on a stormy sea.
How pretty it looked with its parti-coloured sail in
the sunlight, moored in the quiet bay!
“Let that man bear the loss who loosed it from
its moorings.”
But that will not save the vessel—the pretty
thing that might have been a lasting joy.
Mrs. Poyser “Has Her Say Out”
The next Saturday evening there was much excited
discussion at the Donnithorne Arms concerning an incident
which had occurred that very day—no less
than a second appearance of the smart man in top-boots
said by some to be a mere farmer in treaty for the
Chase Farm, by others to be the future steward, but
by Mr. Casson himself, the personal witness to the
stranger’s visit, pronounced contemptuously to
be nothing better than a bailiff, such as Satchell
had been before him. No one had thought of denying
Mr. Casson’s testimony to the fact that he had
seen the stranger; nevertheless, he proffered various
corroborating circumstances.
“I see him myself,” he said; “I
see him coming along by the Crab-tree Meadow on a
bald-faced hoss. I’d just been t’
hev a pint—it was half after ten i’
the fore-noon, when I hev my pint as reg’lar
as the clock—and I says to Knowles, as
druv up with his waggon, ’You’ll get a
bit o’ barley to-day, Knowles,’ I says,
‘if you look about you’; and then I went
round by the rick-yard, and towart the Treddles’on
road, and just as I come up by the big ash-tree, I
see the man i’ top-boots coming along on a bald-faced
hoss—I wish I may never stir if I didn’t.
And I stood still till he come up, and I says, ‘Good
morning, sir,’ I says, for I wanted to hear
the turn of his tongue, as I might know whether he
was a this-country man; so I says, ’Good morning,
sir: it ’ll ’old hup for the barley
this morning, I think. There’ll be a bit
got hin, if we’ve good luck.’ And
he says, ’Eh, ye may be raight, there’s
noo tallin’,’ he says, and I knowed by
that”—here Mr. Casson gave a wink—“as
he didn’t come from a hundred mile off.
I daresay he’d think me a hodd talker, as you
Loamshire folks allays does hany one as talks the
right language.”
“The right language!” said Bartle Massey,
contemptuously. “You’re about as
near the right language as a pig’s squeaking
is like a tune played on a key-bugle.”
“Well, I don’t know,” answered Mr.
Casson, with an angry smile. “I should
think a man as has lived among the gentry from a by,
is likely to know what’s the right language
pretty nigh as well as a schoolmaster.”
