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‘BOOK—Book—Domesday Book!’ They were letting in the water for the evening stint at Robert’s Mill, and the wooden Wheel, where lived the Spirit of the Mill, settled to its nine-hundred-year-old song: ‘Here Azor, a freeman, held one rod, but it never paid geld. Nun-nun-nunquam geldavit. Here Reinbert has one villein and four cottars with one plough—and wood for six hogs and two fisheries of sixpence and a mill of ten shillings—unum molinum—one mill. Reinbert’s mill—Robert’s Mill. Then and afterwards and now—tune et post et modo—Robert’s Mill. Book—Book—Domesday Book!’  ‘I confess,’ said the Black Rat on the crossbeam, luxuriously trimming his whiskers—‘I confess I am not above appreciating my position and all it means.’ He was a genuine old English black rat, a breed which, report says, is rapidly diminishing before the incursions of the brown variety.

‘Appreciation is the surest sign of inadequacy,’ said the Grey Cat, coiled up on a piece of sacking.

‘But I know what you mean,’ she added. ‘To sit by right at the heart of things—eh?’

‘Yes,’ said the Black Rat, as the old mill shook and the heavy stones thuttered on the grist. ‘To possess—er—all this environment as an integral part of one’s daily life must insensibly of course . . . You see?’

‘I feel,’ said the Grey Cat. ‘Indeed, if we are not saturated with the spirit of the Mill, who should be?’

‘Book—Book—Domesday Book!’ The Wheel, set to his work, was running off the tenure of the whole rape, for he knew Domesday Book backwards and forwards: ‘In Ferle tenuit Abbatia de Wiltuna unam hidam et unam virgam et dimidiam. Nunquam geldavit. And Agemond, a freeman, has half a hide and one rod. I remember Agemond well. Charmin’ fellow—friend of mine. He married a Norman girl in the days when we rather looked down on the Normans as upstarts. An’ Agemond’s dead? So he is. Eh, dearie me! dearie me! I remember the wolves howling outside his door in the big frost of Ten Fifty-Nine . . . . Essewelde hundredum nunquam geldum reddidit. Book! Book! Domesday Book!’

‘After all,’ the Grey Cat continued, ‘atmosphere is life. It is the influences under which we live that count in the long run. Now, outside’ she cocked one ear towards the half-opened door—‘there is an absurd convention that rats and cats are, I won’t go so far as to say natural enemies, but opposed forces. Some such ruling may be crudely effective—I don’t for a minute presume to set up my standards as final—among the ditches; but from the larger point of view that one gains by living at the heart of things, it seems for a rule of life a little overstrained. Why, because some of your associates have, shall I say, liberal views on the ultimate destination of a sack of—er—middlings, don’t they call them——’

‘Something of that sort,’ said the Black Rat, a most sharp and sweet-toothed judge of everything ground in the mill for the last three years.

‘Thanks—middlings be it. Why, as I was saying, must I disarrange my fur and my digestion to chase you round the dusty arena whenever we happen to meet?’

‘As little reason,’ said the Black Rat, ‘as there is for me, who, I trust, am a person of ordinarily decent instincts, to wait till you have gone on a round of calls, and then to assassinate your very charming children.’

‘Exactly! It has its humorous side though.’ The Grey Cat yawned. ‘The miller seems afflicted by it. He shouted large and vague threats to my address, last night at tea, that he wasn’t going to keep cats who “caught no mice.” Those were his words. I remember the grammar sticking in my throat like a herring-bone.’

‘And what did you do?’

‘What does one do when a barbarian utters? One ceases to utter and removes. I removed—towards his pantry. It was a riposte he might appreciate.’

‘Really those people grow absolutely insufferable,’ said the Black Rat. ‘There is a local ruffian who answers to the name of Mangles—a builder—who has taken possession of the outhouses on the far side of the Wheel for the last fortnight. He has constructed cubical horrors in red brick where those deliciously picturesque pigstyes used to stand. Have you noticed?’

‘There has been much misdirected activity of late among the humans. They jabber inordinately. I haven’t yet been able to arrive at their reason for existence.’ The Cat yawned.

‘A couple of them came in here last week with wires, and fixed them all about the walls. Wires protected by some abominable composition, ending in iron brackets with glass bulbs. Utterly useless for any purpose and artistically absolutely hideous. What do they mean?’

‘Aaah! I have known four-and-twenty leaders of revolt in Faenza,’ said the Cat, who kept good company with the boarders spending a summer at the Mill Farm. ‘It means nothing except that humans occasionally bring their dogs with them. I object to dogs in all forms.’

‘Shouldn’t object to dogs,’ said the Wheel sleepily . . . . ‘The Abbot of Wilton kept the best pack in the county. He enclosed all the Harryngton Woods to Sturt Common. Aluric, a freeman, was dispossessed of his holding. They tried the case at Lewes, but he got no change out of William de Warrenne on the bench. William de Warrenne fined Aluric eight and fourpence for treason, and the Abbot of Wilton excommunicated him for blasphemy. Aluric was no sportsman. Then the Abbot’s brother married . . . . I’ve forgotten her name, but she was a charmin’ little woman. The Lady Philippa was her daughter. That was after the barony was conferred. She rode devilish straight to hounds. They were a bit throatier than we breed now, but a good pack one of the best. The Abbot kept ’em in splendid shape. Now, who was the woman the Abbot kept? Book—Book ! I shall have to go right back to Domesday and work up the centuries: Modo per omnia reddit burgum tunc—tunc—tunc! Was it burgum or hundredum? I shall remember in a minute. There’s no hurry.’ He paused as he turned over, silvered with showering drops.

‘This won’t do,’ said the Waters in the sluice. ‘Keep moving.’

The Wheel swung forward; the Waters roared on the buckets and dropped down to the darkness below.

‘Noisier than usual,’ said the Black Rat. ‘It must have been raining up the valley.’

‘Floods maybe,’ said the Wheel dreamily. ‘It isn’t the proper season, but they can come without warning. I shall never forget the big one—when the Miller went to sleep and forgot to open the hatches. More than two hundred years ago it was, but I recall it distinctly. Most unsettling.’

‘We lifted that wheel off his bearings,’ cried the Waters. ‘We said, “Take away that bauble!” And in the morning he was five miles down the valley—hung up in a tree.’

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‘Vulgar!’ said the Cat. ‘But I am sure he never lost his dignity.’

‘We don’t know. He looked like the Ace of Diamonds when we had finished with him . . . . Move on there! Keep on moving. Over! Get over!’

‘And why on this day more than any other?’ said the Wheel statelily. ‘I am not aware that my department requires the stimulus of external pressure to keep it up to its duties. I trust I have the elementary instincts of a gentleman.’

‘Maybe,’ the Waters answered together, leaping down on the buckets. ‘We only know that you are very stiff on your bearings. Over, get over!’

The Wheel creaked and groaned. There was certainly greater pressure upon him than he had ever felt, and his revolutions had increased from six and three-quarters to eight and a third per minute. But the uproar between the narrow, weed-hung walls annoyed the Grey Cat.

‘Isn’t it almost time,’ she said plaintively, ‘that the person who is paid to understand these things shuts off those vehement drippings with that screw-thing on the top of that box-thing?’

‘They’ll be shut off at eight o’clock as usual,’ said the Rat; ‘then we can go to dinner.’

‘But we shan’t be shut off till ever so late,’ said the Waters gaily. ‘We shall keep it up all night.’

‘The ineradicable offensiveness of youth is partially compensated for by its eternal hopefulness,’ said the Cat. ‘Our dam is not, I am glad to say, designed to furnish water for more than four hours at a time. Reserve is Life.’

‘Thank goodness!’ said the Black Rat. ‘Then they can return to their native ditches.’

‘Ditches!’ cried the Waters; ‘Raven’s Gill Brook is no ditch. It is almost navigable, and we come from there away.’ They slid over solid and compact till the Wheel thudded under their weight.

‘Raven’s Gill Brook,’ said the Rat. ‘I never heard of Raven’s Gill.’

‘We are the waters of Harpenden Brook—down from under Canton Rise. Phew! how the race stinks compared with the heather country.’ Another five foot of water flung itself against the Wheel, broke, roared, gurgled, and was gone.

‘Indeed?’ said the Grey Cat. ‘I am sorry to tell you that Raven’s Gill Brook is cut off from this valley by an absolutely impassable range of mountains, and Callton Rise is more than nine miles away. It belongs to another system entirely.’

‘Ah, yes,’ said the Rat, grinning, ‘but we forget that, for the young, water always runs uphill.’

‘Oh, hopeless! hopeless! hopeless!’ cried the Waters, descending open-palmed upon the Wheel. ‘There is nothing between here and Raven’s Gill Brook that a hundred yards of channelling and a few square feet of concrete could not remove; and hasn’t removed!’

‘And Harpenden Brook is north of Raven’s Gill and runs into Raven’s Gill at the foot of Callton Rise, where the big ilex trees are, and we come from there!’ These were the glassy, clear waters of the high chalk.

‘And Batten’s Ponds, that are fed by springs, have been led through Trott’s Wood, taking the spare water from the old Witches’ Spring under Churt Haw, and we—we—we are their combined waters!’ Those were the Waters from the upland bogs and moors—a porter-coloured, dusky, and foam-flecked flood.

‘It’s all very interesting,’ purred the Cat to the sliding waters, ‘and I have no doubt that Trott’s Woods and Bott’s Woods are tremendously important places; but if you could manage to do your work—whose value I don’t in the least dispute—a little more soberly, I, for one, should be grateful.’

‘Book—book—book—book—book—Domesday Book!’ The urged Wheel was fairly clattering now: ‘In Burgelstaltone a monk holds of Earl Godwin one hide and a half with eight villeins. There is a church—and a monk …. I remember that monk. Blessed if he could rattle his rosary off any quicker than I am doing now . . . and wood for seven hogs. I must be running twelve to the minute . . . almost as fast as Steam. Damnable invention, Steam! . . . Surely it’s time we went to dinner or prayers—or something. Can’t keep up this pressure, day in and day out, and not feel it. I don’t mind for myself, of course. Noblesse oblige, you know. I’m only thinking of the Upper and the Nether Millstones. They came out of the common rock. They can’t be expected to——’

‘Don’t worry on our account, please,’ said the Millstones huskily. ‘So long as you supply the power we’ll supply the weight and the bite.’

‘Isn’t it a trifle blasphemous, though, to work you in this way?’ grunted the Wheel. ‘I seem to remember something about the Mills of God grinding “ slowly.” Slowly was the word!’

‘But we are not the Mills of God. We’re only the Upper and the Nether Millstones. We have received no instructions to be anything else. We are actuated by power transmitted through you.’

‘Ah, but let us be merciful as we are strong. Think of all the beautiful little plants that grow on my woodwork. There are five varieties of rare moss within less than one square yard—and all these delicate jewels of nature are being grievously knocked about by this excessive rush of the water.’

‘Umph!’ growled the Millstones. ‘What with your religious scruples and your taste for botany we’d hardly know you for the Wheel that put the carter’s son under last autumn. You never worried about him!’

‘He ought to have known better.’

‘So ought your jewels of nature. Tell ’em to grow where it’s safe.’

‘How a purely mercantile life debases and brutalises!’ said the Cat to the Rat.

‘They were such beautiful little plants too,’ said the Rat tenderly. ‘Maiden’s-tongue and hart’s-hair fern trellising all over the wall just as they do on the sides of churches in the Downs. Think what a joy the sight of them must be to our sturdy peasants pulling hay!’

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‘Golly!’ said the Millstones. ‘There’s nothing like coming to the heart of things for information’; and they returned to the song that all English water-mills have sung from time beyond telling:

There was a jovial miller once
Lived on the River Dee,
And this the burden of his song
For ever used to be.

Then, as fresh grist poured in and dulled the note

I care for nobody—no, not I,
And nobody cares for me.

‘Even these stones have absorbed something of our atmosphere,’ said the Grey Cat. ‘Nine-tenths of the trouble in this world comes from lack of detachment.’

‘One of your people died from forgetting that, didn’t she?’ said the Rat.

‘One only. The example has sufficed us for generations.’

‘Ah! but what happened to Don’t Care?’ the Waters demanded.

‘Brutal riding to death of the casual analogy is another mark of provincialism!’ The Grey Cat raised her tufted chin. ‘I am going to sleep. With my social obligations I must snatch rest when I can; but, as our old friend here says, Noblesse oblige . . . . Pity me! Three functions to-night in the village, and a barn-dance across the valley!’

‘There’s no chance, I suppose, of your looking in on the loft about two. Some of our young people are going to amuse themselves with a new sacque-dance—best white flour only,’ said the Black Rat.

‘I believe I am officially supposed not to countenance that sort of thing, but youth is youth. . . By the way, the humans set my milk-bowl in the loft these days; I hope your youngsters respect it.’

‘My dear lady,’ said the Black Rat, bowing, ‘you grieve me. You hurt me inexpressibly. After all these years, too!’

‘A general crush is so mixed—highways and hedges—all that sort of thing—and no one can answer for one’s best friends. I never try. So long as mine are amusin’ and in full voice, and can hold their own at a tile-party, I’m as catholic as these mixed waters in the dam here!’

‘We aren’t mixed. We have mixed. We are one now,’ said the Waters sulkily.

‘Still uttering?’ said the Cat. ‘Never mind, here’s the Miller coming to shut you off. Ye-es, I have known—four—or five, is it?—and twenty leaders of revolt in Faenza . . . . A little more babble in the dam, a little more noise in the sluice, a little extra splashing on the wheel, and then——’

‘They will find that nothing has occurred,’ said the Black Rat. ‘The old things persist and survive and are recognised—our old friend here first of all. By the way,’ he turned toward the Wheel, ‘I believe we have to congratulate you on your latest honour.’

‘Profoundly well deserved—even if he had never—as he has—laboured strenuously through a long life for the amelioration of millkind,’ said the Cat, who belonged to many tile and oasthouse committees. ‘Doubly deserved, I may say, for the silent and dignified rebuke his existence offers to the clattering, fidgety-footed demands of—er—some people. What form did the honour take?’

‘It was,’ said the Wheel bashfully, ‘a machine-moulded pinion.’

‘Pinions! Oh, how heavenly!’ the Black Rat sighed. ‘I never see a bat without wishing for wings.’

‘Not exactly that sort of pinion,’ said the Wheel, ‘but a really ornate circle of toothed iron wheels. Absurd, of course, but gratifying. Mr. Mangles and an associate herald invested me with it personally—on my left rim—the side that you can’t see from the mill. I hadn’t meant to say anything about it—or the new steel straps round my axles—bright red, you know—to be worn on all occasions—but, without false modesty, I assure you that the recognition cheered me not a little.’

‘How intensely gratifying!’ said the Black Rat. ‘I must really steal an hour between lights some day and see what they are doing on your left side.’

‘By the way, have you any light on this recent activity of Mr. Mangles?’ the Grey Cat asked. ‘He seems to be building small houses on the far side of the tail-race. Believe me, I don’t ask from any vulgar curiosity.’

‘It affects our Order,’ said the Black Rat simply but firmly.

‘Thank you,’ said the Wheel. ‘Let me see if I can tabulate it properly. Nothing like system in accounts of all kinds. Book! Book! Book! On the side of the Wheel towards the hundred of Burgelstaltone, where till now was a stye of three hogs, Mangles, a freeman, with four villeins and two carts of two thousand bricks, has a new small house of five yards and a half, and one roof of iron and a floor of cement. Then, now, and afterwards beer in large tankards. And Felden, a stranger, with three villeins and one very great cart, deposits on it one engine of iron and brass and a small iron mill of four feet, and a broad strap of leather. And Mangles, the builder, with two villeins, constructs the floor for the same, and a floor of new brick with wires for the small mill. There are there also chalices filled with iron and water, in number fifty-seven. The whole is valued at one hundred and seventy-four pounds . . . . I’m sorry I can’t make myself clearer, but you can see for yourself.’

‘Amazingly lucid,’ said the Cat. She was the more to be admired because the language of Domesday Book is not, perhaps, the clearest medium wherein to describe a small but complete electric-light installation, deriving its power from a water-wheel by means of cogs and gearing.

‘See for yourself—by all means, see for yourself,’ said the Waters, spluttering and choking with mirth.

‘Upon my word,’ said the Black Rat furiously, ‘I may be at fault, but I wholly fail to perceive where these offensive eavesdroppers—er—come in. We were discussing a matter that solely affected our Order.’

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Suddenly they heard, as they had heard many times before, the Miller shutting off the water. To the rattle and rumble of the labouring stones succeeded thick silence, punctuated with little drops from the stayed wheel. Then some water-bird in the dam fluttered her wings as she slid to her nest, and the plop of a water-rat sounded like the fall of a log in the water.

‘It is all over—it always is all over at just this time. Listen, the Miller is going to bed—as usual. Nothing has occurred,’ said the Cat.

Something creaked in the house where the pigstyes had stood, as metal engaged on metal with a clink and a burr.

‘Shall I turn her on?’ cried the Miller.

‘Ay,’ said the voice from the dynamo-house.

‘A human in Mangles’ new house!’ the Rat squeaked.

‘What of it?’ said the Grey Cat. ‘Even supposing Mr. Mangles’ cat’s-meat-coloured hovel pullulated with humans, can’t you see for yourself—that——?’

There was a solid crash of released waters leaping upon the Wheel more furiously than ever, a grinding of cogs, a hum like the hum of a hornet, and then the unvisited darkness of the old mill was scattered by intolerable white light. It threw up every cobweb, every burl and knot in the beams and the floor; till the shadows behind the flakes of rough plaster on the wall lay clearcut as shadows of mountains on the photographed moon.

‘See! See! See!’ hissed the Waters in full flood. ‘Yes, see for yourselves. Nothing has occurred. Can’t you see?’

The Rat, amazed, had fallen from his foothold and lay half-stunned on the floor. The Cat, following her instinct, leaped nigh to the ceiling, and with flattened ears and bared teeth backed in a corner ready to fight whatever terror might be loosed on her. But nothing happened. Through the long aching minutes nothing whatever happened, and her wire-brush tail returned slowly to its proper shape.

‘Whatever it is,’ she said at last, ‘it’s overdone. They can never keep it up, you know.’

‘Much you know,’ said the Waters. ‘Over you go, old man. You can take the full head of us now. Those new steel axlestraps of yours can stand anything. Come along, Raven’s Gill, Harpenden, Callton Rise, Batten’s Ponds, Witches’ Spring, all together! Let’s show these gentlemen how to work!’

‘But—but—I thought it was a decoration. Why—why—why—it only means more work for me!’

‘Exactly. You’re to supply about sixty-eight candle lights when required. But they won’t be all in use at once’

‘Ah! I thought as much,’ said the Cat. ‘The reaction is bound to come.’

‘And,’ said the Waters, ‘you will do the ordinary work of the mill as well.’

‘Impossible!’ the old Wheel quivered as it drove. ‘Aluric never did it—nor Azor, nor Reinbert. Not even William de Warrenne or the Papal Legate. There’s no precedent for it. I tell you there’s no precedent for working a wheel like this.’

‘Wait a while! We’re making one as fast as we can. Aluric and Co. are dead. So’s the Papal Legate. You’ve no notion how dead they are, but we’re here—the Waters of Five Separate Systems. We’re just as interesting as Domesday Book. Would you like to hear about the land-tenure in Trott’s Wood? It’s squat-right, chiefly:’ The mocking Waters leaped one over the other, chuckling and chattering profanely.

‘In that hundred Jenkins, a tinker, with one dog—unus canis—holds, by the Grace of God and a habit he has of working hard, unam hidam—a large potato-patch. Charmin’ fellow, Jenkins. Friend of ours. Now, who the dooce did Jenkins keep? . . . In the hundred of Canton is one charcoal-burner irreligiosissimus homo—a bit of a rip—but a thorough sportsman. Ibi est ecclesia. Non multum. Not much of a church, quia because, episcopus the Vicar irritated the Non-conformists tunc et post et modo—then and afterwards and now—until they built a cut-stone Congregational chapel with red brick facings that did not return itself—defendebat se—at four thousand pounds.’

‘Charcoal-burners, vicars, schismatics, and red brick facings,’ groaned the Wheel. ‘But this is sheer blasphemy. What waters have they let in upon me?’

‘Floods from the gutters. Faugh, this light is positively sickening!’ said the Cat, rearranging her fur.

‘We come down from the clouds or up from the springs, exactly like all other waters everywhere. Is that what’s surprising you?’ sang the Waters.

‘Of course not. I know my work if you don’t. What I complain of is your lack of reverence and repose. You’ve no instinct of deference towards your betters—your heartless parody of the Sacred volume (the Wheel meant Domesday Book) proves it.’

‘Our betters?’ said the Waters most solemnly. ‘What is there in all this dammed race that hasn’t come down from the clouds, or——’

‘Spare me that talk, please,’ the Wheel persisted. ‘You’d never understand. It’s the tone—your tone that we object to.’

‘Yes. It’s your tone,’ said the Black Rat, picking himself up limb by limb.

‘If you thought a trifle more about the work you’re supposed to do, and a trifle less about your precious feelings, you’d render a little more duty in return for the power vested in you—we mean wasted on you,’ the Waters replied.

‘I have been some hundreds of years laboriously acquiring the knowledge which you see fit to challenge so lightheartedly,’ the Wheel jarred.

‘Challenge him! Challenge him!’ clamoured the little waves riddling down through the tailrace. ‘As well now as later. Take him up!’

The main mass of the Waters plunging on the Wheel shocked that well-bolted structure almost into box-lids by saying: ‘Very good. Tell us what you suppose yourself to be doing at the present moment.’

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‘Waiving the offensive form of your question, I answer, purely as a matter of courtesy, that I am engaged in the trituration of farinaceous substances whose ultimate destination it would be a breach of the trust reposed in me to reveal.’

‘Fiddle!’ said the Waters. ‘We knew it all along! The first direct question shows his ignorance of his own job. Listen, old thing. Thanks to us, you are now actuating a machine of whose construction you know nothing, that that machine may, over wires of whose ramifications you are, by your very position, profoundly ignorant, deliver a power which you can never realise, to localities beyond the extreme limits of your mental horizon, with the object of producing phenomena which in your wildest dreams (if you ever dream) you could never comprehend. Is that clear, or would you like it all in words of four syllables?’

‘Your assumptions are deliciously sweeping, but may I point out that a decent and—the dear old Abbot of Wilton would have put it in his resonant monkish Latin much better than I can—a scholarly reserve does not necessarily connote blank vacuity of mind on all subjects?’

‘Ah, the dear old Abbot of Wilton,’ said the Rat sympathetically, as one nursed in that bosom. ‘Charmin’ fellow—thorough scholar and gentleman. Such a pity!’

‘Oh, Sacred Fountains!’—the Waters were fairly boiling. ‘He goes out of his way to expose his ignorance by triple bucketfuls. He creaks to high Heaven that he is hopelessly behind the common order of things! He invites the streams of Five Watersheds to witness his su-su-su-pernal incompetence, and then he talks as though there were untold reserves of knowledge behind him that he is too modest to bring forward. For a bland, circular, absolutely sincere imposter, you’re a miracle, O Wheel!’

‘I do not pretend to be anything more than an integral portion of an accepted and not altogether mushroom institution.’

‘Quite so,’ said the Waters. ‘Then go round—hard——’

‘To what end?’ asked the Wheel.

‘Till a big box of tanks in your house begins to fizz and fume—gassing is the proper word.’

‘It would be,’ said the Cat, sniffing.

‘That will show that your accumulators are full. When the accumulators are exhausted, and the lights burn badly, you will find us whacking you round and round again.’

‘The end of life as decreed by Mangles and his creatures is to go whacking round and round for ever,’ said the Cat.

‘In order,’ the Rat said, ‘that you may throw raw and unnecessary illumination upon all the unloveliness in the world. Unloveliness which we shall—er—have always with us. At the same time you will riotously neglect the so-called little but vital graces that make up Life.’

‘Yes, Life,’ said the Cat, ‘with its dim delicious half-tones and veiled indeterminate distances. Its surprisals, escapes, encounters, and dizzying leaps—its full-throated choruses in honour of the morning star, and its melting reveries beneath the sun-warmed wall.’

‘Oh, you can go on the tiles, Pussalina, just the same as usual,’ said the laughing Waters. ‘We shan’t interfere with you.’

‘On the tiles, forsooth!’ hissed the Cat.

‘Well, that’s what it amounts to,’ persisted the Waters. ‘We see a good deal of the minor graces of life on our way down to our job.’

‘And—but I fear I speak to deaf ears—do they never impress you?’ said the Wheel.

‘Enormously,’ said the Waters. ‘We have already learned six refined synonyms for loafing.’

‘But (here again I feel as though preaching in the wilderness) it never occurs to you that there may exist some small difference between the wholly animal—ah—rumination of bovine minds and the discerning, well-apportioned leisure of the finer type of intellect?’

‘Oh, yes. The bovine mind goes to sleep under a hedge and makes no bones about it when it’s shouted at. We’ve seen that—in haying-time—all along the meadows. The finer type is wide awake enough to fudge up excuses for shirking, and mean enough to get stuffy when its excuses aren’t accepted. Turn over!’

‘But, my good people, no gentleman gets stuffy as you call it. A certain proper pride, to put it no higher, forbids——’

‘Nothing that he wants to do if he really wants to do it. Get along! What are you giving us? D’you suppose we’ve scoured half heaven in the clouds and half earth in the mists, to be taken in at this time of the day by a bone-idle, old handquern of your type?’

‘It is not for me to bandy personalities with you. I can only say that I simply decline to accept the situation.’

‘Decline away. It doesn’t make any odds. They’ll probably put in a turbine if you decline too much.’

‘What’s a turbine?’ said the Wheel quickly.

‘A little thing you don’t see, that performs surprising revolutions. But you won’t decline. You’ll hang on to your two nice red-strapped axles and your new machine-moulded pinions like—a—like a leech on a lily stem! There’s centuries of work in your old bones if you’d only apply yourself to it; and, mechanically, an overshot wheel with this head of water is about as efficient as a turbine.’

‘So in future I am to be considered mechanically? I have been painted by at least five Royal Academicians.’

‘Oh, you can be painted by five hundred when you aren’t at work, of course. But while you are at work you’ll work. You won’t half-stop and think and talk about rare plants and dicky-birds and farinaceous fiduciary interests. You’ll continue to revolve, and this new head of water will see that you do so continue.’

‘It is a matter on which it would be exceedingly ill-advised to form a hasty or a premature conclusion. I will give it my most careful consideration,’ said the Wheel.

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‘Please do,’ said the Waters gravely. ‘Hullo! Here’s the Miller again.’

The Cat coiled herself in a picturesque attitude on the softest corner of a sack, and the Rat without haste, yet certainly without rest, slipped behind the sacking as though an appointment had just occurred to him.

In the doorway, with the young Engineer, stood the Miller grinning amazedly.

‘Well—well—well! ’tis true-ly won’erful. An’ what a power o’ dirt! It come over me now looking at these lights, that I’ve never rightly seen my own mill before. She needs a lot bein’ done to her.’

‘Ah! I suppose one must make oneself moderately agreeable to the baser sort. They have their uses. This thing controls the dairy.’ The Cat, pincing on her toes, came forward and rubbed her head against the Miller’s knee.

‘Ay, you pretty puss,’ he said, stooping. ‘You’re as big a cheat as the rest of ’em that catch no mice about me. A won’erful smooth-skinned, rough-tongued cheat you be. I’ve more than half a mind——’

‘She does her work well,’ said the Engineer, pointing to where the Rat’s beady eyes showed behind the sacking. ‘Cats and Rats liven’ together—see?’

‘Too much they do—too long they’ve done. I’m sick and tired of it. Go and take a swim and larn to find your own vittles honest when you come out, Pussy.’

‘My word!’ said the Waters, as a sprawling Cat landed all unannounced in the centre of the tailrace. ‘Is that you, Mewsalina? You seem to have been quarrelling with your best friend. Get over to the left. It’s shallowest there. Up on that alder-root with all four paws. Goodnight!’

‘You’ll never get any they rats,’ said the Miller, as the young Engineer struck wrathfully with his stick at the sacking. ‘They’re not the common sort. They’re the old black English sort.’

‘Are they, by Jove? I must catch one to stuff, some day.’

Six months later, in the chill of a January afternoon, they were letting in the Waters as usual.

‘Come along! It’s both gears this evening,’ said the Wheel, kicking joyously in the first rush of the icy stream. ‘There’s a heavy load of grist just in from Lamber’s Wood. Eleven miles it came in an hour and a half in our new motor-lorry, and the Miller’s rigged five new five-candle lights in his cow-stables. I’m feeding ’em tonight. There’s a cow due to calve. Oh, while I think of it, what’s the news from Canton Rise?’

‘The waters are finding their level as usual—but why do you ask?’ said the deep outpouring Waters.

‘Because Mangles and Felden and the Miller are talking of increasing the plant here and running a saw-mill by electricity. I was wondering whether we——’

‘I beg your pardon,’ said the Waters, chuckling. ‘What did you say? ‘

‘Whether we, of course, had power enough for the job. It will be a biggish contract. There’s all Harpenden Brook to be considered and Batten’s Ponds as well, and Witches’ Spring, and the Churt Haw system.’

‘We’ve power enough for anything in the world,’ said the Waters. ‘The only question is whether you could stand the strain if we came down on you full head.’

‘Of course I can,’ said the Wheel. ‘Mangles is going to turn me into a set of turbines—beauties.’

‘Oh—er—I suppose it’s the frost that has made us a little thick-headed, but to whom are we talking?’ asked the amazed Waters.

‘To me—the Spirit of the Mill, of course.’

‘Not to the old Wheel, then?’

‘I happen to be living in the old Wheel just at present. When the turbines are installed I shall go and live in them. What earthly difference does it make?’

‘Absolutely none,’ said the Waters, ‘in the earth or in the waters under the earth. But we thought turbines didn’t appeal to you.’

‘Not like turbines? Me? My dear fellows, turbines are good for fifteen hundred revolutions a minute—and with our power we can drive ’em at full speed. Why, there’s nothing we couldn’t grind or saw or illuminate or heat with a set of turbines! That’s to say if all the Five Watersheds are agreeable.’

‘Oh, we’ve been agreeable for ever so long.’

‘Then why didn’t you tell me?’

‘Don’t know. Suppose it slipped our memory.’ The Waters were holding themselves in for fear of bursting with mirth.

‘How careless of you! You should keep abreast of the age, my dear fellows. We might have settled it long ago, if you’d only spoken. Yes, four good turbines and a neat brick penstock—eh? This old Wheel’s absurdly out of date.’

‘Well,’ said the Cat, who after a little proud seclusion had returned to her place impenitent as ever. ‘Praised be Pasht and the Old Gods, that whatever may have happened I, at least, have preserved the Spirit of the Mill!’

She looked round as expecting her faithful ally, the Black Rat; but that very week the Engineer had caught and stuffed him, and had put him in a glass case; he being a genuine old English black rat. That breed, the report says, is rapidly diminishing before the incursions of the brown variety.

[a short tale]

“THE old cat’s tumbled down the ventilator, sir, and he’s swearing away under the fumace-door in the stoke-hole,” said the second officer to the Captain of the Whanghoa, “Now what in thunder was Erastasius doing at the mouth of the ventilator? It’s four feet from the ground and painted red at that. Any of the children been amusing themselves with him, d’you think? I wouldn’t have Erastasius disturbed in his inside for all the gold in the treasury,” said the Captain. “Tell some one to bring him up, and handle him delicately, for he’s not a quiet beast.”

In three minutes a bucket appeared on deck. It was covered with a wooden lid. “Think he have make die this time,” said the Chinese sailor who carried the coffin, with a grin, “Catchee him topside coals—no open eye—no spit—no sclatchee my. Have got bucket, allee same, and make tight. See!”

He dived his bare arm mider the lid, but withdrew it with a yell, dropping the bucket at the same time. “Hya! Can do. Maskee dlop down—masky spilum coal. Have catchee my light there.”

Blood was trickling from his elbow. He moved aft, while the bucket, mysteriously worked by hidden force, trundled to and fro across the decks, swearing aloud.

Emerged finally Erastasius, tom-cat and grandfather-in-chief of the Whanghoa— a gaunt brindled beast, lacking one ear, with every hair on his body armed and erect. He was patched with coal-dust, very stiff and sore all over, and very anxious to take the world into his confidence as to his wrongs. For this reason he did not run when he was clear of the bucket, but sitting on his hunkers regarded the Captain, as who would say: “You hold a master’s certificate and call yourself a seaman, and yet you allow this sort of thing on your boat”

“Guess I must apologise, old man,” said the Captain gravely. “Those ventilators are a little too broad in the beam for a passenger of your build. What made you walk down it? Not a rat, eh? You’re too well fed to trouble of rats. Drink was it.”

Erastasius turned his back on the Captain. He was a tailless Japanese cat, and the abruptness of his termination gave him a specially brusque appearance.

“Shouldn’t wonder if the old man hasn’t been stealing something and was getting away from the galley. He’s the biggest reprobate that ever shipped—and that’s saying something. No, he isn’t my property exactly. I’ve got a notion that he owns the ship. Gathered that from the way he goes round after six bells to see the lights out. The chief engineer says he built the engines. Anyway, the old man sits in the engine-room and sort of keeps an eye on the boilers. He was on the ship before I joined her—that’s seven years ago, when we were running up and down and around about the China Seas.”

Erastasius, his back to the company, was busied in cleaning his disarranged fur. The ventilator incident had hurt his feelings sorely.

“He knows we are talking about him,” continued the Captain. “He’s a responsible kind o’ critter. That’s natural when you come to think that he has saved a quarter of a million dollars. At present his wants are few—guess he would like a netting over those ventilators first thing—but someday he’ll begin to live up to his capital.’

“Saved a quarter of a million dollars! What securities did he invest ’em in?” said a man from Foochow.

Here, in this bottom. He saved the Whanghoa with a full cargo of tea, silk and opium, and thirteen thousand dollars in bar silver. Yes; that’s about the extent of the old man’s savings. I commanded. The old man was the rescuer, and I was more than grateful to him ’cause it was my darned folly that nearly bought us into trouble. I was new to these waters, new to the Chinaman and his facinating little ways, being a New England man by raising. Erstasius was raised by the Devil. That’s who his sire was. Never ran across his dam. Ran across a forsaken sea, though, in the Whanghoa, a little to the north-east of this, with eight hundred steerage passengers, all Chinamen, for various and undenominated ports. Had the pleasure of sending eighteen of ’em into the water. Yes, that’s so isn’t it old man?”

Earstasius finished licking himself and mewed affirmatively.

“Yes, we carried four white officers—a Westerner, two Vermont men, and myself. There were ten Americans, a couple of Danes and a half-caste knocking around the ship, and the crew were Chinese, but most of ’em good Chinese. Only good Chinese I ever met. We had our steerage passengers ’tween decks. Most of ’em lay around and played dominoes or smoked opium. We had bad weather at the start, and the steerage were powerful sick. I judged they would have no insides to them when the weather lifted, so I didn’t put any guards on them. Wanted all my men to work the ship. Engines rotten as Congress, and under sail half the time. Next time I carry Chinese steerage trash I’ll hire a Gatling and mount it on the ’tween-decks hatch.

“We were fooling about between islands— about a himdred and fifty thousand islands all wrapped up in fog. When the fog laid the wind, the engines broke down. One of the passengers—we carried no ladies that journey—came to me one evening. ‘I calculate there’s a conspiracy ’tween-decks,’ he said. ‘Those pigtails are talking together. No good ever came of pigtails talking. I’m from ’Frisco. I authoritate on these matters.’ ‘Not on this ship,’ I said: ‘I’ve no use for duplicate authority.’ ‘You’ll be homesick after nine this time to-morrow,’ he said and quit. I guess he told the other passengers his notions.

“Erastasius shared my cabin in general. I didn’t care to dispute with a cat that went heeled the way he did. That particular night when I came down he was not inclined for repose. When I shut the door he scrabbled till I let him out. When he was out he scrabbled to come back. When he was back, he jumped all round the shanty yowling. I stroked him, and the sparks irrigated his back as if ’twas the smoke-stack of a river steamer. ‘I’11 get you a wife, old man,’ I said, ‘next voyage. It is no good for you to be alone with me.’ ‘Whoopee, yoopee-yaw-aw-aw,’ said Erastasius. ‘Let me get out of this.’ I looked him square between the eyes to fix the place where I’d come down with a boot-heel (he was getting monotonous), and as I looked I saw the animal was just possessed with deadly fear —human fear—crawling, shaking fear. It crept out of the green of his eyes and crept over me in billowing waves—each wave colder than the last. ‘Unburden your mind, Erastasius,’ I said. ‘What’s going to happen?’ ‘Wheepee-yeepee-ya-ya-ya-woop,’ said Erastasius, backing to the door and scratching.

“I quit my cabin sweating big drops, and somehow my hand shut on my six-shooter. The grip of the handle soothes a man when he is afraid. I heard the whole ship ’tween-decks rustling under me like all the woods of Maine when the wind’s up. The lamp over the ’tween-decks was out. The steerage watchman was lying on the groimd, and the whole hive of Celestials were on the tramp—soft-footed hounds. A lantern came down the alleyway. Behind it was the passenger that had spoken to me, and all the rest of the crowd, except the half-caste.

“‘Are you homesick any now?’ said my passenger. The ’tween-decks woke up with a yell at the light, and some one fired up the hatch-way. Then we began our share of the fun— the ten passengers and I. Eleven six-shooters. That cleared the first rush of the pigtails, but we continued firing on principle, working our way down the steps. No one came down from the spar-deck to assist, though I heard considerable of a trampling. The pigtails below were growling like cats. I heard the look-out man shout, ‘Junk on the port bow,’ and the bell ring in the engine-room for full speed ahead. Then we struck something, and there was a yell inside and outside the ship that would have lifted your hair out. When the outside yell stopped, our pigtails were on their faces. ‘Run down a junk,’ said my passenger—‘their junk.’ He loosed three shots into the steerage on the strength of it. I went up on deck when things were quiet below. Some one had run our Dahlgren signal-gun forward and pointed it to the break of the fo’c’sle. There was the balance of a war junk—three spars and a head or two on the water, and the first mate keeping his watch in regular style.

“‘What is your share?’ he said. ‘We’ve smashed up a junk that tried to foul us. Seems to have affected the feelings of your friends below. Guess they wanted to make connection.’ ‘It is made,’ said I, ‘on the Glassy Sea. Where’s the watch?’ ‘In the fo’c’sle. The half-caste is sitting on the signal-gun smoking his cigar. The watch are speculatin’ whether he’ll stick the business-end of it in the touch-hole or continue smoking. I gather that gun is not empty.’ ‘Send ‘em down below to wash decks. Tell the quartermaster to go through their boxes while they are away. They may have implements.’

“The watch went below to clean things up. There were eighteen stiff uns and fourteen with holes through their systems. Some died, some survived. I did not keep particular count. The balance I roped up, and it employed most of our spare rigging. When we touched port there was a picnic among the hangmen. Seems that Erastasius had been yowling down the cabins all night before he came to me, and kept the passengers alive. The man that spoke to me said the old man’s eyes were awful to look at. He was dying to tell his fear, but couldn’t. When the passengers came forward with the light, the half-caste quit for topside and got the quartermaster to load the signal-gun with handspikes and bring it forward in case the fo’c’sle wished to assist in the row. That was the best half-caste I ever met. But the fo’c’sle didn’t assist. They were sick. So were the men below—horror-sick. That was the way the old man saved the Whanghoa.’

page 1 of 6

THE new Church Visitor had just left after a twenty minutes’ call. During that time, Mrs. Ashcroft had used such English as an elderly, experienced, and pensioned cook should, who had seen life in London. She was the readier, therefore, to slip back into easy, ancient Sussex (Ts softening to ‘d’s as one warmed) when the ’bus brought Mrs. Fettley from thirty miles away for a visit, that pleasant March Saturday. The two had been friends since childhood; but, of late, destiny had separated their meetings by long intervals.Much was to be said, and many ends, loose since last time, to be ravelled up on both sides, before Mrs. Fettley, with her bag of quilt-patches, took the couch beneath the window commanding the garden, and the football-ground in the valley below.

‘Most folk got out at Bush Tye for the match there,’ she explained, ‘so there weren’t no one for me to cushion agin, the last five mile. An’ she do just-about bounce ye.’

‘You’ve took no hurt,’ said her hostess. ‘You don’t brittle by agein’, Liz.’

Mrs. Fettley chuckled and made to match a couple of patches to her liking. ‘No, or I’d ha’ broke twenty year back. You can’t ever mind when I was so’s to be called round, can ye? ‘

Mrs. Ashcroft shook her head slowly—she never hurried—and went on stitching a sack-cloth lining into a list-bound rush tool-basket. Mrs. Fettley laid out more patches in the Spring light through the geraniums on the window-sill, and they were silent awhile.

‘What like’s this new Visitor o’ yourn?’ Mrs. Fettley inquired, with a nod towards the door. Being very short-sighted, she had, on her entrance, almost bumped into the lady.

Mrs. Ashcroft suspended the big packing-needle judicially on high, ere she stabbed home. ‘Settin’ aside she don’t bring much news with her yet, I dunno as I’ve anythin’ special agin her.’

‘Ourn, at Keyneslade,’ said Mrs. Fettley, ‘she’s full o’ words an’ pity, but she don’t stay for answers. Ye can get on with your thoughts while she clacks.’

‘This ’un don’t clack. She’s aimin’ to be one o’ those High Church nuns, like.’

‘Ourn’s married, but, by what they say, she’ve made no great gains of it . . .’ Mrs. Fettley threw up her sharp chin. ‘Lord! How they dam’ cherubim do shake the very bones o’ the place! ‘

The tile-sided cottage trembled at the passage of two specially chartered forty-seat charabancs on their way to the Bush Tye match; a regular Saturday’ shopping’ ’bus, for the county’s capital, fumed behind them; while, from one of the crowded inns, a fourth car backed out to join the procession, and held up the stream of through pleasure-traffic.

‘You’re as free-tongued as ever, Liz,’ Mrs. Ashcroft observed.

‘Only when I’m with you. Otherwhiles, I’m Granny—three times over. I lay that basket’s for one o’ your gran’chiller—ain’t it? ‘

‘’Tis for Arthur—my Jane’s eldest.’

‘But he ain’t workin’ nowheres, is he? ‘

‘No. ’Tis a picnic-basket.’

‘You’re let off light. My Willie, he’s allus at me for money for them aireated wash-poles folk puts up in their gardens to draw the music from Lunnon, like. An’ I give it ’im—pore fool me! ‘

‘An’ he forgets to give you the promise-kiss after, don’t he?’ Mrs. Ashcroft’s heavy smile seemed to strike inwards.

‘He do. ’No odds ’twixt boys now an’ forty year back. ’Take all an’ give naught-an’ we to put up with it! Pore fool we! Three shillin’ at a time Willie’ll ask me for!’

‘They don’t make nothin’ o’ money these days,’ Mrs. Ashcroft said.

‘An’ on’y last week,’ the other went on, ‘me daughter, she ordered a quarter pound suet at the butchers’s; an’ she sent it back to ’im to be chopped. She said she couldn’t bother with choppin’ it.’

‘I lay he charged her, then.’

‘I lay he did. She told me there was a whisk-drive that afternoon at the Institute, an’ she couldn’t bother to do the choppin’.’

‘Tck!’

Mrs. Ashcroft put the last firm touches to the basket-lining. She had scarcely finished when her sixteen-year-old grandson, a maiden of the moment in attendance, hurried up the garden-path shouting to know if the thing were ready, snatched it, and made off without acknowledgment. Mrs. Fettley peered at him closely.

‘They’re goin’ picnickin’ somewheres,’ Mrs. Ashcroft explained.

‘Ah,’ said the other, with narrowed eyes. ‘I lay he won’t show much mercy to any he comes across, either. Now ’oo the dooce do he remind me of, all of a sudden? ‘

‘They must look arter theirselves—’same as we did.’ Mrs. Ashcroft began to set out the tea.

‘No denyin’ you could, Gracie,’ said Mrs. Fettley.

‘What’s in your head now?’

‘Dunno . . . But it come over me, sudden-like—about dat woman from Rye—I’ve slipped the name—Barnsley, wadn’t it? ‘

‘Batten—Polly Batten, you’re thinkin’ of.’

‘That’s it—Polly Batten. That day she had it in for you with a hay-fork—’time we was all hayin’ at Smalldene—for stealin’ her man.’

‘But you heered me tell her she had my leave to keep him?’ Mrs. Ashcroft’s voice and smile were smoother than ever.

‘I did—an’ we was all looking that she’d prod the fork spang through your breastes when you said it.’

‘No-oo. She’d never go beyond bounds—Polly. She shruck too much for reel doin’s.’

page 2

‘Allus seems to me,’ Mrs. Fettley said after a pause, ‘that a man ’twixt two fightin’ women is the foolishest thing on earth. ’Like a dog bein’ called two ways.’

‘Mebbe. But what set ye off on those times, Liz? ‘

‘That boy’s fashion o’ carryin’ his head an’ arms. I haven’t rightly looked at him since he’s growed. Your Jane never showed it, but—him! Why, ’tis Jim Batten and his tricks come to life again! . . . Eh?’

‘Mebbe. There’s some that would ha’ made it out so—bein’ barren-like, themselves.’

‘Oho! Ah well! Dearie, dearie me, now! . . . An’ Jim Batten’s been dead this——’

‘Seven and twenty year,’ Mrs. Ashcroft answered briefly. ‘Won’t ye draw up, Liz?’

Mrs. Fettley drew up to buttered toast, currant bread, stewed tea, bitter as leather, some home-preserved pears, and a cold boiled pig’s tail to help down the muffins. She paid all the proper compliments.

‘Yes. I dunno as I’ve ever owed me belly much,’ said Mrs. Ashcroft thoughtfully. ‘We only go through this world once.’

‘But don’t it lay heavy on ye, sometimes?’ her guest suggested.

‘Nurse says I’m a sight liker to die o’ me indigestion than me leg.’ For Mrs. Ashcroft had a long-standing ulcer on her shin, which needed regular care from the Village Nurse, who boasted (or others did, for her) that she had dressed it one hundred and three times already during her term of office.

‘An’ you that was so able, too! It’s all come on ye before your full time, like. I’ve watched ye goin’.’ Mrs. Fettley spoke with real affection.

‘Somethin’s bound to find ye sometime. I’ve me ’eart left me still,’ Mrs. Ashcroft returned.

‘You was always big-hearted enough for three. That’s somethin’ to look back on at the day’s eend.’

‘I reckon you’ve your back-lookin’s, too,’ was Mrs. Ashcroft’s answer.

‘You know it. But I don’t think much regardin’ such matters excep’ when I’m along with you, Gra’. ’Takes two sticks to make a fire.’

Mrs. Fettley stared, with jaw half-dropped, at the grocer’s bright calendar on the wall. The cottage shook again to the roar of the motortraffic, and the crowded football-ground below the garden roared almost as loudly; for the village was well set to its Saturday leisure.

Mrs. Fettley had spoken very precisely for some time without interruption, before she wiped her eyes. ‘And,’ she concluded, ‘they read ’is death-notice to me, out o’ the paper last month. O’ course it wadn’t any o’ my becomin’ concerns—let be I ’adn’t set eyes on him for so long. O’ course I couldn’t say nor show nothin’. Nor I’ve no rightful call to go to Eastbourne to see ’is grave, either. I’ve been schemin’ to slip over there by the ’bus some day; but they’d ask questions at ’ome past endurance. So I ’aven’t even that to stay me.’

‘But you’ve ’ad your satisfactions?’

‘Godd! Yess! Those four years ’e was workin’ on the rail near us. An’ the other drivers they gave him a brave funeral, too.’

‘Then you’ve naught to cast-up about. ’Nother cup o’ tea?’

The light and air had changed a little with the sun’s descent, and the two elderly ladies closed the kitchen-door against chill. A couple of jays squealed and skirmished through the undraped apple-trees in the garden. This time, the word was with Mrs. Ashcroft, her elbows on the teatable, and her sick leg propped on a stool . . . .

‘Well I never! But what did your ’usband say to that?’ Mrs. Fettley asked, when the deep-toned recital halted.

‘’E said I might go where I pleased for all of ’im. But seein’ ’e was bedrid, I said I’d ’tend ’im out. ’E knowed I wouldn’t take no advantage of ’im in that state. ’E lasted eight or nine week. Then he was took with a seizure-like; an’ laid stone-still for days. Then ’e propped ’imself up abed an’ says: “You pray no man’ll ever deal with you like you’ve dealed with some.” “An’ you?” I says, for you know, Liz, what a rover ’e was. “It cuts both ways,” says ’e, “but I’m death-wise, an’ I can see what’s comin’ to you.” He died a-Sunday an’ was buried a-Thursday . . . An’ yet I’d set a heap by him—one time or—did I ever? ‘

‘You never told me that before,’ Mrs. Fettley ventured.

‘I’m payin’ ye for what ye told me just now. Him bein’ dead, I wrote up, sayin’ I was free for good, to that Mrs. Marshall in Lunnon—which gave me my first place as kitchen-maid—Lord, how long ago! She was well pleased, for they two was both gettin’ on, an’ I knowed their ways. You remember, Liz, I used to go to ’em in service between whiles, for years—when we wanted money, or — or my ’usband was away — on occasion.’

‘’E did get that six months at Chichester, didn’t ’e?’ Mrs. Fettley whispered. ‘We never rightly won to the bottom of it.’

‘’E’d ha’ got more, but the man didn’t die.’

‘’None o’ your doin’s, was it, Gra’?’

‘No! ’Twas the woman’s husband this time. An’ so, my man bein’ dead, I went back to them Marshall’s, as cook, to get me legs under a gentleman’s table again, and be called with a handle to me name. That was the year you shifted to Portsmouth.’

‘Cosham,’ Mrs. Fettley corrected. ‘There was a middlin’ lot o’ new buildin’ bein’ done there. My man went first, an’ got the room, an’ I follered.’

‘Well, then, I was a year—abouts in Lunnon, all at a breath, like, four meals a day an’ livin’ easy. Then, ’long towards autumn, they two went travellin’, like, to France; keepin’ me on, for they couldn’t do without me. I put the house to rights for the caretaker, an’ then I slipped down ’ere to me sister Bessie—me wages in me pockets, an’ all ’ands glad to be’old of me.’

page 3

‘That would be when I was at Cosham,’ said Mrs. Fettley.

‘You know, Liz, there wasn’t no cheap-dog pride to folk, those days, no more than there was cinemas nor whisk-drives. Man or woman ’ud lay hold o’ any job that promised a shillin’ to the backside of it, didn’t they? I was all peaked up after Lunnon, an’ I thought the fresh airs ’ud serve me. So I took on at Smalldene, obligin’ with a hand at the early potato-liftin, stubbin’ hens, an’ such-like. They’d ha’ mocked me sore in my kitchen in Lunnon, to see me in men’s boots, an me petticoats all shorted.’

‘Did it bring ye any good?’ Mrs. Fettley asked.

‘’Twadn’t for that I went. You know, ’s’well’s me, that na’un happens to ye till it ’as ’appened. Your mind don’t warn ye before’and of the road ye’ve took, till you’re at the far eend of it. We’ve only a backwent view of our proceedin’s.’

‘’Oo was it? ‘

‘’Arry Mockler.’ Mrs. Ashcroft’s face puckered to the pain of her sick leg.

Mrs. Fettley gasped. ‘’Arry? Bert Mockler’s son! An’ I never guessed! ‘

Mrs. Ashcroft nodded. ‘An’ I told myself—an’ I beleft it—that I wanted field-work.’

‘What did ye get out of it? ‘

‘The usuals. Everythin’ at first—worse than naught after. I had signs an’ warnings a-plenty, but I took no heed of ’em. For we was burnin’ rubbish one day, just when we’d come to know how ’twas with—with both of us. ’Twas early in the year for burnin’, an’ I said so. “No!” says he. “ The sooner dat old stuff’s off an’ done with,” ’e says, “the better.” ’Is face was harder’n rocks when he spoke. Then it come over me that I’d found me master, which I ’adn’t ever before. I’d allus owned ’em, like.’

‘Yes ! Yes ! They’re yourn or you’re theirn,’ the other sighed. ‘I like the right way best.’

‘I didn’t. But ’Arry did . . . ’Long then, it come time for me to go back to Lunnon. I couldn’t. I clean couldn’t! So, I took an’ tipped a dollop o’ scaldin’ water out o’ the copper one Monday mornin’ over me left ’and and arm. Dat stayed me where I was for another fortnight.’

‘Was it worth it?’ said Mrs. Fettley, looking at the silvery scar on the wrinkled fore-arm.

Mrs. Ashcroft nodded. ‘An’ after that, we two made it up ’twixt us so’s ’e could come to Lunnon for a job in a liv’rystable not far from me. ’E got it. I’tended to that. There wadn’t no talk nowhere. His own mother never suspicioned how ’twas. He just slipped up to Lunnon, an’ there we abode that winter, not ’alf a mile ’tother from each.’

‘Ye paid ’is fare an’ all, though’; Mrs. Fettley spoke convincedly.

Again Mrs. Ashcroft nodded. ‘Dere wadn’t much I didn’t do for him. ’E was me master, an’—O God, help us!—we’d laugh over it walkin’ together after dark in them paved streets, an’ me corns fair wrenchin’ in me boots! I’d never been like that before. Ner he! Ner he!’

Mrs. Fettley clucked sympathetically.

‘An’ when did ye come to the eend?’ she asked.

‘When ’e paid it all back again, every penny. Then I knowed, but I wouldn’t suffer meself to know. “You’ve been mortal kind to me,” he says. “Kind!” I said. “’Twixt us?” But ’e kep’ all on tellin’ me ’ow kind I’d been an’ ’e’d never forget it all his days. I held it from off o’ me for three evenin’s, because I would not believe. Then ’e talked about not bein’ satisfied with ’is job in the stables, an’ the men there puttin’ tricks on ’im, an’ all they lies which a man tells when ’e’s leavin’ ye. I heard ’im out, neither ’elpin’ nor ’inderin’. At the last, I took off a fiddle brooch which he’d give me an’ I says: “Dat’ll do. I ain’t askin’ na’un’.” An’ I turned me round an’ walked off to me own sufferin’s. ’E didn’t make ’em worse. ’E didn’t come nor write after that. ’E slipped off ’ere back ’ome to ’is mother again.’

‘An’ ’ow often did ye look for ’en to come back?’ Mrs. Fettley demanded mercilessly.

‘More’n once—more’n once! Goin’ over the streets we’d used, I thought de very pave-stones ’ud shruck out under me feet.’

‘Yes,’ said Mrs. Fettley. ‘I dunno but dat don’t ’urt as much as aught else. An’ dat was all ye got? ‘

‘No. ’Twadn’t. That’s the curious part, if you’ll believe it, Liz.’

‘I do. I lay you’re further off lyin’ now than in all your life, Gra’.’

‘I am . . . An’ I suffered, like I’d not wish my most arrantest enemies to. God’s Own Name! I went through the hoop that spring! One part of it was ’eddicks which I’d never known all me days before. Think o’ me with an ’eddick! But I come to be grateful for ’em. They kep’ me from thinkin’ . . .’

‘’Tis like a tooth,’ Mrs. Fettley commented. ‘It must rage an’ rugg till it tortures itself quiet on ye; an’ then—then there’s na’un left.’

‘I got enough lef’ to last me all my days on earth. It come about through our charwoman’s fiddle girl—Sophy Ellis was ’er name—all eyes an’ elbers an’ hunger. I used to give ’er vittles. Otherwhiles, I took no special notice of ’er, an’ a sight less, o’ course, when me trouble about ’Arry was on me. But—you know how fiddle maids first feel it sometimes—she come to be crazy-fond o’ me, pawin’ an’ cuddlin’ all whiles; an’ I ’adn’t the ’eart to beat ’er off . . . One afternoon, early in spring ’twas, ’er mother ’ad sent ’er round to scutchel up what vittles she could off of us. I was settin’ by the fire, me apern over me head, halfmad with the ’eddick, when she slips in. I reckon I was middlin’ short with ’er. “Lor’!” she says. “Is that all? I’ll take it off you in two-twos! “ I told her not to lay a finger on me, for I thought she’d want to stroke my forehead; an’—I ain’t that make. “I won’t tech ye,” she says, an’ slips out again. She ’adn’t been gone ten minutes ’fore me old ’eddick took off quick as bein’ kicked. So I went about my work. Prasin’ly, Sophy comes back, an’ creeps into my chair quiet as a mouse. ’Er eyes was deep in ’er ’ead an’ ’er face all drawed. I asked ’er what ’ad ’appened. “Nothin’,” she says. “On’y I’ve got it now.” “Got what?” I says. “ Your ’eddick,” she says, all hoarse an’ sticky-tipped. “I’ve took it on me.” “Nonsense,” I says, “it went of itself when you was out. Lay still an’ I’ll make ye a cup o’ tea.” “’Twon’t do no good,” she says, “till your time’s up. ’Ow long do your ’eddicks last?” “Don’t talk silly,” I says, “or I’ll send for the Doctor.” It looked to me like she might be hatchin’ de measles. “Oh, Mrs. Ashcroft,” she says, stretchin’ out ’er fiddle thin arms. “I do love ye.” There wasn’t any holdin’ agin that. I took ’er into me lap an’ made much of ’er. “Is it truly gone?” she says. “Yes,” I says, “an’ if ’twas you took it away, I’m truly grateful.” “’Twas me,” she says, layin’ ’er cheek to mine. “No one but me knows how.” An’ then she said she’d changed me ’eddick for me at a Wish ’Ouse.’

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‘Whatt?’ Mrs. Fettley spoke sharply.

‘A Wish House. No! I’adn’t ’eard o’ such things, either. I couldn’t get it straight at first, but, puttin’ all together, I made out that a Wish ’Ouse ’ad to be a house which ’ad stood unlet an’ empty long enough for Some One, like, to come an’ in’abit there. She said a fiddle girl that she’d played with in the livery-stables where ‘Arty worked ’ad told ’er so. She said the girl ’ad belonged in a caravan that laid up, o’ winters, in Lunnon. Gipsy, I judge.’

‘Ooh! There’s no sayin’ what Gippos know, but I’ve never ’eard of a Wish ’Ouse, an’ I know—some things,’ said Mrs. Fettley.

‘Sophy said there was a Wish ’Ouse in Wadloes Road just a few streets off, on the way to our green-grocer’s. All you ’ad to do, she said, was to ring the bell an’ wish your wish through the slit o’ the letter-box. I asked ’er if the fairies give it ’er? “Don’t ye know,” she says, “there’s no fairies in a Wish ’Ouse? There’s on’y a Token.”’

‘Goo’ Lord A’mighty! Where did she come by that word?’ cried Mrs. Fettley; for a Token is a wraith of the dead or, worse still, of the living.

‘The caravan-girl ’ad told ’er, she said. Well, Liz, it troubled me to ’ear ’er, an’ lyin’ in me arms she must ha’ felt it. “That’s very kind o’ you,” I says, holdin’ ’er tight, “to wish me ’eddick away. But why didn’t ye ask somethin’ nice for yourself?” “You can’t do that,” she says. “All you’ll get at a Wish ’Ouse is leave to take some one else’s trouble. I’ve took Ma’s ’eddicks, when she’s been kind to me; but this is the first time I’ve been able to do aught for you. Oh, Mrs. Ashcroft, I do just—about love you.” An’ she goes on all like that. Liz, I tell you my ’air e’en a’most stood on end to ’ear ’er. I asked ’er what like a Token was. “I dunno,” she says, “but after you’ve ringed the bell, you’ll ’ear it run up from the basement, to the front door. Then say your wish,” she says, “an’ go away.” “The Token don’t open de door to ye, then?” I says. “Oh no,” she says. “You on’y ’ear gigglin’, like, be’ind the front door. Then you say you’ll take the trouble off of ’oo ever ’tis you’ve chose for your love; an’ yell get it,” she says. I didn’t ask no more—she was too ’ot an’ fevered. I made much of ’er till it come time to light de gas, an’ a fiddle after that, ’er ’eddick—mine, I suppose—took off, an’ she got down an’ played with the cat.’

‘Well, I never!’ said Mrs. Fettley. ‘Did—did ye foller it up, anyways?‘

‘She askt me to, but I wouldn’t ’ave no such dealin’s with a child.’

‘What did ye do, then?’

‘’Sat in me own room ’stid o’ the kitchen when me ’eddicks come on. But it lay at de back o’ me mind.’

‘’Twould. Did she tell ye more, ever?’

‘No. Besides what the Gippo girl ’ad told ’er, she knew naught, ’cept that the charm worked. An’, next after that—in May ’twas—I suffered the summer out in Lunnon. ’Twas hot an’ windy for weeks, an’ the streets stinkin’ o’ dried ’orsedung blowin’ from side to side an’ lyin’ level with the kerb. We don’t get that nowadays. I ’ad my ’ol’day just before hoppin’, an’ come down ’ere to stay with Bessie again. She noticed I’d lost flesh, an’ was all poochy under the eyes.’

‘Did ye see ‘Arry?”

Mrs. Ashcroft nodded. ‘The fourth—no, the fifth day. Wednesday ’twas. I knowed ’e was workin’ at Smalldene again. I asked ’is mother in the street, bold as brass. She ’adn’t room to say much, for Bessie—you know ’er tongue—was talkin’ full-clack. But that Wednesday, I was walkin’ with one o’ Bessie’s chillern hangin’ on me skirts, at de back o’ Chanter’s Tot. Prasin’ly, I felt ’e was be’ind me on the footpath, an’ I knowed by ’is tread ’e’d changed ’is nature. I slowed, an’ I heard ’im slow. Then I fussed a piece with the child, to force him past me, like. So ’e ’ad to come past. ’E just says “Good-evenin’,” and goes on, tryin’ to pull ’isself together.’

‘Drunk, was he?’ Mrs. Fettley asked.

‘Never! S’runk an’ wizen; ’is clothes ’angin’ on ’im like bags, an’ the back of ’is neck whiter’n chalk. ’Twas all I could do not to oppen my arms an’ cry after him. But I swallered me spittle till I was back ’ome again an’ the chillern abed. Then I says to Bessie, after supper, “What in de world’s come to ‘Arry Mockler?” Bessie told me ’e’d been a-Hospital for two months, ’long o’ cuttin’ ’is foot wid a spade, muckin’ out the old pond at Smalldene. There was poison in de dirt, an’ it rooshed up ’is leg, like, an’ come out all over him. ’E ’adn’t been back to ’is job—carterin’ at Smalldene—more’n a fortnight. She told me the Doctor said he’d go off, likely, with the November frostes; an’ ’is mother ’ad told ’er that ’e didn’t rightly eat nor sleep, an’ sweated ’imself into pools, no odds ’ow chill ’e lay. An’ spit terrible o’ mornin’s. “Dearie me,” I says. “But, mebbe, hoppin’ ’ll set ’im right again,” an’ I licked me thread-point an’ I fetched me needle’s eye up to it an’ I threads me needle under de lamp, steady as rocks. An’ dat night (me bed was in de wash-house) I cried an’ I cried. An’ you know, Liz—for you’ve been with me in my throes—it takes summat to make me cry.’

‘Yes; but Chile-bearin’ is on’y just pain,’ said Mrs. Fettley.

‘I come round by cock-crow, an’ dabbed cold tea on me eyes to take away the signs. Long towards nex’ evenin’—I was settin’ out to lay some flowers on me ’usband’s grave, for the look o’ the thing—I met ’Arry over against where the War Memorial is now. ’E was comin’ back from ’is ’orses, so ’e couldn’t not see me. I looked ’im all over, an’ “’Arry,” I says twix’ me teeth, “come back an’ rest-up in Lunnon.” “I won’t take it,” he says, “for I can give ye naught.” “I don’t ask it,” I says. “By God’s Own Name, I don’t ask na’un ! On’y come up an’ see a Lunnon doctor.” ’E lifts ’is two ’eavy eyes at me: “’Tis past that, Gra’,” ’e says. “I’ve but a few months left.” “’Arry!” I says. “My man!” I says. I couldn’t say no more. ’Twas all up in me throat. “Thank ye kindly, Gra’,” ’e says (but ’e never says “my woman”), an’ ’e went on upstreet an’ ’is mother—Oh, damn ’er!—she was watchin’ for ’im, an’ she shut de door be’ind ’im.’

Mrs. Fettley stretched an arm across the table, and made to finger Mrs. Ashcroft’s sleeve at the wrist, but the other moved it out of reach.

‘So I went on to the churchyard with my flowers, an’ I remembered my ’usband’s warnin’ that night he spoke. ’E was death-wise, an’ it ’ad ’appened as ’e said. But as I was settin’ down de jam-pot on the grave-mound, it come over me there was one thing I could do for ’Arry. Doctor or no Doctor, I thought I’d make a trial of it. So I did. Nex’ mornin’, a bill came down from our Lunnon green-grocer. Mrs. Marshall, she’d lef’ me petty cash for suchlike—o’ course—but I tole Bess ’twas for me to come an’ open the ’ouse. So I went up, afternoon train.’

‘An’—but I know you ’adn’t—’adn’t you no fear? ‘

‘What for? There was nothin’ front o’ me but my own shame an’ God’s croolty. I couldn’t ever get ’Arry—’ow could I? I knowed it must go on burnin’ till it burned me out.’

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‘Aie!’ said Mrs. Fettley, reaching for the wrist again, and this time Mrs. Ashcroft permitted it.

‘Yit ’twas a comfort to know I could try this for ’im. So I went an’ I paid the green-grocer’s bill, an’ put ’is receipt in me hand-bag, an’ then I stepped round to Mrs. Ellis—our char-an’ got the ’ouse-keys an’ opened the ’ouse. First, I made me bed to come back to (God’s Own Name! Me bed to lie upon!). Nex’ I made me a cup o’ tea an’ sat down in the kitchen thinkin’, till ’long towards dusk. Terrible close, ’twas. Then I dressed me an’ went out with the receipt in me ’and-bag, feignin’ to study it for an address, like. Fourteen, Wadloes Road, was the place—a liddle basement-kitchen ’ouse, m a row of twenty-thirty such, an’ tiddy strips o’ walled garden in front—the paint off the front doors, an’ na’un done to na’un since ever so long. There wasn’t ’ardly no one in the streets ’cept the cats. ’Twas ’ot, too! I turned into the gate bold as brass; up de steps I went an’ I ringed the front-door bell. She pealed loud, like it do in an empty house. When she’d all ceased, I ’eard a cheer, like, pushed back on de floor o’ the kitchen. Then I ’eard feet on de kitchen-stairs, like it might ha’ been a heavy woman in slippers. They come up to de stairhead, acrost the hall—I ’eard the bare boards creak under ’em—an’ at de front door dey stopped. I stooped me to the letter-box slit, an’ I says: “Let me take everythin’ bad that’s in store for my man, ’Arry Mockler, for love’s sake.” Then, whatever it was ’tother side de door let its breath out, like, as if it ’ad been holdin’ it for to ’ear better.’

‘Nothin’ was said to ye?’ Mrs. Fettley demanded.

‘Na’un. She just breathed out—a sort of A-ah, like. Then the steps went back an’ downstairs to the kitchen—all draggy—an’ I heard the cheer drawed up again.’

‘An’ you abode on de doorstep, throughout all, Gra’? ‘

Mrs. Ashcroft nodded.

‘Then I went away, an’ a man passin’ says to me: “Didn’t you know that house was empty?” “No,” I says. “I must ha’ been give the wrong number.” An’ I went back to our ’ouse, an’ I went to bed; for I was fair flogged out. ’Twas too ’ot to sleep more’n snatches, so I walked me about, lyin’ down betweens, till crack o’ dawn. Then I went to the kitchen to make me a cup o’ tea, an’ I hitted meself just above the ankle on an old roastin’ jack o’ mine that Mrs. Ellis had moved out from the corner, her last cleanin’. An’ so—nex’ after that—I waited till the Marshalls come back o’ their holiday.’

‘Alone there? I’d ha’ thought you’d ’ad enough of empty houses,’ said Mrs. Fettley, horrified.

‘Oh, Mrs. Ellis an’ Sophy was runnin’ in an’ out soon’s I was back, an’ ’twixt us we cleaned de house again top-to-bottom. There’s allus a hand’s turn more to do in every house. An’ that’s ’ow ’twas with me that autumn an’ winter, in Lunnon.’

‘Then na’un hap—overtook ye for your doin’s? ‘

Mrs. Ashcroft smiled. ‘No. Not then. ’Long in November I sent Bessie ten shillin’s.’

‘You was allus free-’anded,’ Mrs. Fettley interrupted.

‘An’ I got what I paid for, with the rest o’ the news. She said the hoppin’ ’ad set ’im up wonderful. ’E’d ’ad six weeks of it, and now ’e was back again carterin’ at Smalldene. No odds to me ’ow it ’ad ’appened—’slong’s it ’ad. But I dunno as my ten shillin’s eased me much. ’Arry bein’ dead, like, ’e’d ha’ been mine, till Judgment. ’Arry bein’ alive, ’e’d like as not pick up with some woman middlin’ quick. I raged over that. Come spring, I ’ad somethin’ else to rage for. I’d growed a nasty little weepin’ boil, like, on me shin, just above the boot-top, that wouldn’t heal no shape. It made me sick to look at it, for I’m clean-fleshed by nature. Chop me all over with a spade, an’ I’d heal like turf. Then Mrs. Marshall she set ’er own doctor at me. ’E said I ought to ha’ come to him at first go-off, ’stead o’ drawn’ all manner o’ dyed stockm’s over it for months. ’E said I’d stood up too much to me work, for it was settin’ very close atop of a big swelled vein, like, behither the small o’ me ankle. “Slow come, slow go,” ’e says. “Lay your leg up on high an’ rest it,” he says, “an’ ’twill ease off. Don’t let it close up too soon. You’ve got a very fine leg, Mrs. Ashcroft,” ’e says. An’ he put wet dressin’s on it.’

‘’E done right.’ Mrs. Fettley spoke firmly. ‘Wet dressin’s to wet wounds. They draw de humours, same’s a lamp-wick draws de oil.’

‘That’s true. An’ Mrs. Marshall was allus at me to make me set down more, an’ dat nigh healed it up. An’ then after a while they packed me off down to Bessie’s to finish the cure; for I ain’t the sort to sit down when I ought to stand up. You was back in the village then, Liz.’

‘I was. I was, but—never did I guess!’

‘I didn’t desire ye to.’ Mrs. Ashcroft smiled. ‘I saw ’Arry once or twice in de street, wonnerful fleshed up an’ restored back. Then, one day I didn’t see ’im, an’ ’is mother told me one of ’is ’orses ’ad lashed out an’ caught ’im on the ’ip. So ’e was abed an’ middlin’ painful. An’ Bessie, she says to his mother, ’twas a pity ’Arry ’adn’t a woman of ’is own to take the nursin’ off ’er. And the old lady was mad! She told us that ’Arry ’ad never looked after any woman in ’is born days, an’ as long as she was atop the mowlds, she’d contrive for ’im till ’er two ’ands dropped off. So I knowed she’d do watch-dog for me, ’thout askin’ for bones.’

Mrs. Fettley rocked with small laughter.

‘That day,’ Mrs. Ashcroft went on, ‘I’d stood on me feet nigh all the time, watchin’ the doctor go in an’ out; for they thought it might be ’is ribs, too. That made my boil break again, issuin’ an’ weepin’. But it turned out ’twadn’t ribs at all, an’ ’Arry ’ad a good night. When I heard that, nex’ mornin’, I says to meself, “I won’t lay two an’ two together yit. I’ll keep me leg down a week, an’ see what comes of it.” It didn’t hurt me that day, to speak of—’seemed more to draw the strength out o’ me like—an’ ’Arry ’ad another good night. That made me persevere; but I didn’t dare lay two an’ two together till the week-end, an’ then, ’Arry come forth e’en a’most ’imself again—na’un hurt outside ner in of him. I nigh fell on me knees in de washhouse when Bessie was up-street. “I’ve got ye now, my man,” I says. “You’ll take your good from me ’thout knowin’ it till my life’s end. O God, send me long to live for ’Arry’s sake!” I says. An’ I dunno that didn’t still me ragin’s.’

‘For good?’ Mrs. Fettley asked.

‘They come back, plenty times, but, let be how ’twould, I knowed I was doin’ for ’im. I knowed it. I took an’ worked me pains on an’ off, like regulatin’ my own range, till I learned to ’ave ’em at my commandments. An’ that was funny, too. There was times, Liz, when my trouble ’ud all s’rink an’ dry up, like. First, I used to try an’ fetch it on again; bein’ fearful to leave ’Arry alone too long for anythin’ to lay ’old of. Prasin’ly I come to see that was a sign he’d do all right awhile, an’ so I saved myself’

‘’Ow long for?’ Mrs. Fettley asked, with deepest interest.

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‘I’ve gone de better part of a year onct or twice with na’un more to show than the liddle weepin’ core of it, like. All s’rinked up an’ dried off. Then he’d inflame up—for a warnin’—an’ I’d suffer it. When I couldn’t no more—an’ I ’ad to keep on goin’ with my Lunnon work—I’d lay me leg high on a cheer till it eased. Not too quick. I knowed by the feel of it, those times, dat ’Arry was in need. Then I’d send another five shillin’s to Bess, or somethin’ for the chillern, to find out if, mebbe, ’e’d took any hurt through my neglects. ’Twas so! Year in, year out, I worked it dat way, Liz, an’ ’e got ’is good from me ’thout knowin’—for years and years.’

‘But what did you get out of it, Gra’?’ Mrs. Fettley almost wailed. ‘Did ye see ’im reg’lar? ‘

‘Times—when I was ’ere on me ’ol’days. An’ more, now that I’m ’ere for good. But ’e’s never looked at me, ner any other woman ’cept ’is mother. ’Ow I used to watch an’ listen! So did she.’

‘Years an’ years!’ Mrs. Fettley repeated. ‘An’ where’s ’e workin’ at now?’

‘Oh, ’e’s give up carterin’ quite a while. He’s workin’ for one o’ them big tractorisin’ firms—plowin’ sometimes, an’ sometimes off with lorries—fur as Wales, I’ve ’eard. He comes ’ome to ’is mother ’tween whiles; but I don’t set eyes on him now, fer weeks on end. No odds! ’Is job keeps ’im from continuin’ in one stay anywheres.’

‘But just for de sake o’ sayin’ somethin’—s’pose ’Arry did get married?’ said Mrs. Fettley.

Mrs. Ashcroft drew her breath sharply between her still even and natural teeth. ‘Dat ain’t been required of me,’ she answered. ‘I reckon my pains ’ull be counted agin that. Don’t you, Liz?’

‘It ought to be, dearie. It ought to be.’

‘It do ’urt sometimes. You shall see it when Nurse comes. She thinks I don’t know it’s turned.’

Mrs. Fettley understood. Human nature seldom walks up to the word ‘cancer.’

‘Be ye certain sure, Gra’?’ she asked.

‘I was sure of it when old Mr. Marshall ’ad me up to ’is study an’ spoke a long piece about my faithful service. I’ve obliged ’em on an’ off for a goodish time, but not enough for a pension. But they give me a weekly ’lowance for life. I knew what that sinnified—as long as three years ago.

‘Dat don’t prove it, Gra’.’

‘To give fifteen bob a week to a woman ’oo’d live twenty year in the course o’ nature? It do!’

‘You’re mistook! You’re mistook!’ Mrs. Fettley insisted.

‘Liz, there’s no mistakin’ when the edges are all heaped up, like—same as a collar. You’ll see it. An’ I laid out Dora Wickwood, too. She ’ad it under the arm-pit, like.’

Mrs. Fettley considered awhile, and bowed her head in finality.

‘’Ow long d’you reckon ’twill allow ye, countin’ from now, dearie?’

‘Slow come, slow go. But if I don’t set eyes on ye ’fore next hoppin’, this’ll be good-bye, Liz.’

‘Dunno as I’ll be able to manage by then—not ’thout I have a liddle dog to lead me. For de chillern, dey won’t be troubled, an’—O Gra’! I’m blindin’ up—I’m blindin’ up!’

‘Oh, dat was why you didn’t more’n finger with your quilt-patches all this while! I was wonderin’ . . . But the pain do count, don’t ye think, Liz? The pain do count to keep ’Arry where I want ’im. Say it can’t be wasted, like.’

‘I’m sure of it—sure of it, dearie. You’ll ’ave your reward.’

‘I don’t want no more’n this—if de pain is taken into de reckonin’.’

‘’Twill be—’twill be, Gra’.’

There was a knock on the door.

‘That’s Nurse. She’s before ’er time,’ said Mrs. Ashcroft. ‘Open to ’er.’

The young lady entered briskly, all the bottles in her bag clicking. ‘Evenin’, Mrs. Ashcroft,’ she began. ‘I’ve come raound a little earlier than usual because of the Institute dance to-na-ite. You won’t ma-ind, will you? ,

‘Oh, no. Me dancin’ days are over.’ Mrs. Ashcroft was the self-contained domestic at once.

‘My old friend, Mrs. Fettley ’ere, has been settin’ talkin’ with me a while.’

‘I hope she ’asn’t been fatiguing you?’ said the Nurse a little frostily.

‘Quite the contrary. It ’as been a pleasure. Only—only—just at the end I felt a bit—a bit flogged out like.’

‘Yes, yes.’ The Nurse was on her knees already, with the washes to hand. ‘When old ladies get together they talk a deal too much, I’ve noticed.’

‘Mebbe we do,’ said Mrs. Fettley, rising. ‘So now I’ll make myself scarce.’

‘Look at it first, though,’ said Mrs. Ashcroft feebly. ‘I’d like ye to look at it.’

Mrs. Fettley looked, and shivered. Then she leaned over, and kissed Mrs. Ashcroft once on the waxy yellow forehead, and again on the faded grey eyes.

‘It do count, don’t it—de pain?’ The lips that still kept trace of their original moulding hardly more than breathed the words.

Mrs. Fettley kissed them and moved towards the door.

PLEASE may I come in? I am Boots. I am son of Kildonan Brogue—Champion Reserve—V.H.C.—very fine dog; and no-dash-parlour-tricks, Master says, except I can sit-up, and put paws over nose. It is called ‘Making Beseech.’ Look! I do it out of own head. Not for telling . . . . This is Flat-in-Town. I live here with Own God. I tell:

There is walk-in-Park-on-lead. There is off-lead-when-we-come-to-the-grass. There is ’nother dog, like me, off-lead. I say: ‘Name?’ He says: ‘Slippers.’ He says: ‘Name?’ I say: ‘Boots.’ He says: ‘I am fine dog. I have Own God called Miss.’ I say: ‘I am very-fine dog. I have Own God called Master.’ There is walk-round-on-toes. There is Scrap. There is Proper Whacking. Master says ‘Sorry! Awfully sorry! All my fault.’ Slippers’s Miss says: ‘Sorry! My fault too.’ Master says: ‘So glad it is both our faults. Nice little dog, Slippers.’ Slippers’s Miss says ‘Do you really think so?’ Then I made ‘Beseech.’ Slippers’s Miss says: ‘Darling little dog, Boots.’ There is on-lead, again, and walking with Slippers behind both Own Gods, long times . . . . Slippers is not-half-bad dog. Very like me. ‘Make-fine-pair, Master says . . . . There is more walkings in Park. There is Slippers and his Miss in that place, too. Own Gods walk together—like on-lead. We walk behind. We are tired. We yawn. Own Gods do not look. Own Gods do not hear . . . . They have put white bows on our collars. We do not like. We have pulled off. They are bad to eat . . . .

Now we live at Place-in-Country, next to Park, and plenty good smells. We are all here. Please look! I count paws. There is me, and own God-Master. There is Slippers, and Slippers’s Own God-Missus. That is all my paws. There is Adar. There is Cookey. There is James-with-Kennel-that-Moves. There is Harry-with-Spade. That is all Slippers’s paws. I cannot count more; but there is Maids, and Odd-man, and Postey, and Telegrams, and Pleasm-butcher and People. And there is Kitchen Cat which runs up Wall. Bad! Bad! Bad!

At morning-time Adar unties and brushes. There is going quick upstairs past Cookey and asking Gods to come to brekker. There is lie-down-under-the-table-at-each-end, and heads-on-feets of Gods. Sometimes there is things-gived-under-table. But ‘must never beg.’

After brekker, there is hunting Kitchen Cat all over garden to Wall. She climbs. We sit under and sing. There is waiting for Gods going walks. If it is nothing-on-their-tops, it is only round the garden, and ‘get-off-the-flower-bedsyou-two!’ If it is wet, it is hearth-rugs by fire, or ‘who-said-you-could-sit-on-chairs-Little-Men?’ It is always being-with Own Gods—Own Master and Own Missus. We are most fine dogs . . . . There is Tall far-off dog, which comes through laurels, and looks. We have found him by own dust-bin. We said: ‘Come back, and play!’ But he wented off. His legs are all bendy. And wavy ears. But bigger than Me!

Please sit up! I will tell you by Times and Long Times—each time at a time. I tell good things and dretful things.

Beginning of Times. There was walk with Own Gods, and ‘basket-of-things-to-eat-when-wesit-down—piggies.’ It were long walks. We ate lots. After, there was rabbits which would not stay. We hunted. We heard sorrowful singing in woods. We went look-see. There was that far-off Tall dog, singing to hole in bank. He said: ‘I have been here dretful long whiles, and I do not know where here is.’ We said ‘Follow tails!’ He followed back to Own Gods. Missus said: ‘Oh, you poor big baby!’ Master said: ‘What on earth is Kent’s puppy doing here?’ Tall dog went on tum plenty, and said small. There was ‘give-him-what’s-left.’ He kissed hands. We all wented home across fields. He said he were playing with washing-on-line, which waved like tails. He said little old dog with black teeth came, and said he would make him grow-into-a-hound, if he went with. So he wented with, and found beautiful Smell. Old dog said him to put his dash-nose-upon-the-ground and puzzle. He puzzled long ways with old dog. There was field full of ’ware-sheep and beautiful Smell stopped. Old dog was angry and said him to cast-forward. But Peoples came saying loud. He ran into woods. Old dog said if he waited long enough there he would grow-into-a-hound, and it would do-him-good to have to find his way home, because he would have to do it most of his life if he was so-dash-stoopid-as-all-that. Old dog went away and Tall dog waited for more beautiful Smell, and it was night-times, and he did not know where home was, and he singed what we heard. He were very sorry. He is quite new dog. He says he is called ‘DamPuppy.’ After long whiles there was smells which he knew. So he went through hedge and ran to his home. He said he was in-for-Proper-Whacking.

One Time after That. Kitchen Cat sits on Wall. We sing. She says: ‘ Own Gods are going away.’ Slippers says: ‘They come back at Biscuit-time.’ Kitchen Cat says: ‘This time they will go and never come back.’ Slippers says: ‘That is not real rat.’ Kitchen Cat says: ‘Go to top of House, and see what Adar is doing with kennels-that-shut.’

We go to top of House. There is Adar and kennels-that-shut. She fills with things off Gods’ feets and tops and middles. We go downstairs. We do not understand . . . .

Kitchen Cat sits on Wall and says: ‘Now you have seen that Own Gods are going. Wait till kennels-that-shut are put behind kennel-that-moves, and Own Gods get in. Then you will know.’ Slippers says: ‘How do you know where that rat will run?’ Kitchen Cat says ‘Because I am Cat. You are Dog. When you have done things, you ask Own Gods if it is Whack or Pat. You crawl on turn. You say “Please, I will be good.” What will you do when Own Gods go and never come back?’ Slippers said: ‘I will bite you when I catch you.’ Kitchen Cat said: ‘Grow legs!’

She ran down Wall and went to Kitchen. We came after. There was Cookey and broom. Kitchen Cat sat in window and said: ‘Look at this Cookey. Sometimes this is thick Cookey; sometimes this is thin Cookey. But it is always my Cookey. I am never Cookey’s Cat. But you must always have Own Gods with. Else you go bad. What will you do when Own Gods go away?’ We were not comfy. We went inside House. We asked Own Gods not to go away and never come back. They did not understand . . . .

Time After. Own Gods have gone away in kennel-that-moves, with kennels-that-shut behind! Kennel came back at Biscuit-time, but no Gods. We went over House looking. Kitchen Cat said: ‘Now you see!’ We went to look everywhere. There was nothing . . . . There is Peoples called Carpenters come. They are making a little House inside Big House. There is Postey talking to Adar. There is Pleasm-butcher talking to Cookey. There is everybody talking. Everybody says: ‘Poor little chaps.’ And goes away.

Some more Time. This night-time, Shiny Plate shined into our kennels, and made sing. We sang: ‘When will Own Gods come back?’ Adar looked out from high-up-above, and said ‘Stop that, or I’ll come down to you.’ We were quiet, but Shiny Plate shined more. We singed ‘We will be good when the Gods come back.’ Adar came down. There was Whackings. We are poor little small dogs. We live in Outside Places. Nobody cares for.

Other more times. I have met that Tall far-off dog with large feet. He is not called ‘DamPuppy.’ He is called Ravager-son-of-Regan. He has no Own God because he will pass-the-bottle-round-and-grow-into-a-Hound. He lives across Park, at Walk, with dretful Peoples called Mister-Kent. I have wented to Walk. There were fine smells and pig-pups, and a bucket full of old things. Ravager said: ‘Eat hearty!’ He is nice dog. I ate lots. Ravager put his head through handle of bucket. It would not go away from him. He went back-first, singing. He sang: ‘I am afraid.’ Peoples came running. I went away. I wented into dark place called Dairy. There was butters and creams. People came. I went out of a little window. I sicked-up two times before I could run quick. I went to own kennel and lay down. That Peoples called Mister-Kent came afterwards. He said to Adar ‘That little black beast is dam-thief.’ Adar said ‘Nonsense! He is asleep.’ Slippers came and said: ‘Come and play Rats.’ I said: ‘Go to Walk and play with Ravager.’ Slippers wented. People thought Slippers was me. Slippers came home quick. I am very fine dog—but Master has not come back!

After that Time. I am Bad Dog. I am Very Bad Dog. I am ‘G’way-you-dirty-little-devil!’ I found a Badness on the road. I liked it! I rolled in it! It were nice! I came home. There was Cookey and Adar. There was ‘Don’t;-you-come-anigh-me.’ There was James-with-kennel-that-moves. There was: ‘Come ’ere, you young pole-cat!’ He picked up, and washed with soap, and sticky water out of kennel-that-moves rubbed into all my hairs. There was tieup. I smelled very bad to myself. Kitchen Cat came. I said: ‘G’way! I am Filfy Bad Dog! I am Proper Stink-pot!’ Kitchen Cat said ‘That is not your own rat. You are bad because Own Gods do not come back. You are like Peoples who can not be good without Own Gods to pat.’

Other Fresh Times. Now I am great friend of Ravager. Slippers and me have wented to hunt Hen at Walk. She were angry Hen-lady with pups. She bit Slippers, two times, with her nose, under his eye. We all went one way. There was Pig-lady with pups that way. We went other way. There was Mister-Kent-Peoples with whack-stick that way. We wented more ways, quick. We found a fish-head on a heap of nice old things. There was Ravager. We all went for play. There was cow-pups in field. They ran after. We went under gate and said. They ran away. W e ran after till they stopped. They turned round. We went away again. They ran after. We played a long while. It were fun. Mister-Kent-People and more Peoples came calling dretful names. We said to Ravager: ‘We will go home.’ Ravager said: ‘Me too.’ He ran across field. We went home by small ditches. We played Rat-sticks on the lawn.

Cowman Peoples came and said to Adar ‘Those two little devils have been chasing pounds off the calves!’Adar said: ‘Be ashamed of yourself! Look at ’em! Good as gold!’ We waited till Peoples were gone. We asked for sugar. Adar gave. Ravager came through laurels—all little. He said: ‘I have had Proper Whacking. What did you get?’ We said ‘Sugar.’ He said: ‘You are very fine dogs. I am hungry.’ I said: ‘I will give you my store-bone in the border. Eat hearty.’ He digged. We helped. Harry-with-Spade came. Ravager went through laurels like Kitchen Cat. We got Proper Whacking and tie-up for digging in borders . . . . When we are bad, there is Sugar. When we are good, there is Whack-whack. That is same rat going two wrong ways . . . .

Harry-with-Spade has brought a Rat . . . . Look, please! Please look! I am Rrreal Dog! I have killed a Rat. I have slew a Rat! He bit me on the nose. I bit him again. I bit him till he died. I shookened him dead! Harry said ‘Go-ood boy! ’Born ratter!’ I am very-fine-dog-indeed! Kitchen Cat sat on the Wall and said: ‘That is not your own Rat. You killed it to please a God.’ When my legs are grown, I will kill Kitchen Cat like Rats. Bad! Bad! Bad!

Time soon After. I wented to Walk to tell my friend Ravagerabout my Rat, and find more things to kill. Ravager said: ‘There is ’ware-sheep for me, and there is ’ware-chicken for me, but there is no ’ware-Bull for me. Come into Park and play with Bull-in-yard.’ We went under Bull’s gate in his yard. Ravager said ‘He is too fat to run. Say!’ I said. Bull said. Ravager said. Slippers said. I got under watertrough and said dretful things. Bull blew with nose. I went out through fence, and came back through another hole. Ravager said from other side of yard. Bull spun. He blew. He was too fat. It were fun. We heard Mister-Kent saying loud. We went home across Park. Ravager says I am True Sporting Dog, only except because of my little legs.

Bad Times dead. Sit up! Sit up now! I tell! I tell! There has been washings and Sunday collars. Carpenter Peoples has gone away, and left new Small House inside Big House. There is very small kennel-that-rocks inside Small House. Adar showed. We went to James’s house. He were gone away with kennel-that-moves. We went to front-gate. We heard! We saw! Own Gods—very Own Gods—Master—Missus—came back! We said. We danced. We rolled. We ran round. We went to tea, heads-on-feets of Own Gods! There were buttered toasts gived under table, and two sugars each . . . .

We heard New Peoples talking in Big House. One Peoples said: ‘Angh! Angh!’ very small like cat-pups. Other Peoples said: ‘Bye-loe! Bye-loe! ‘We asked Own Gods to show. We went upstairs to Small House. Adar was giving cup-o’-tea to New Peoples, more thick than Adar, which was called ‘Nurse.’ There was very-small-talk inside kennel-that-rocks. It said ‘Aie! Aie!’ We looked in. Adar held collars. It were very Small Peoples. It opened its own mouth. But there was no teeth. It waved paw. I kissed. Slippers kissed. New Thick, which is that Nurse, said: ‘Well-Mum-I-never!’ Both Own Gods sat down by Smallest Peoples and said and said and kissed paw. Smallest Peoples said very loud. New Thick gave biscuit in a bottle. We tail-thumped on floor, but ‘not-for-you-greedies.’ We went down to hunt Kitchen Cat. She ran up apple—tree. We said ‘Own Gods have come back, with one Smallest New Peoples, in smallest-kennel!’ Kitchen Cat said: ‘That is not Peoples. That is Own Gods’ Very Own Smallest. Now you are only dirty little dogs. If you say too loud to me or Cookey, you will wake that Smallest, and there will be Proper Whackings. If you scratch, New Thick will say: “Fleas! Fleas!” and there will be more Proper Whackings. If you come in wet, you will give Smallest sneezes. So you will be pushed Outside, and you will scratch at doors that shut-in-your-eye. You will belong with Yards and Brooms and Cold Passages and all the Empty Places.’ Slippers said: ‘Let us go to Own Kennel and lie down.’ We wented.

We heard Own Gods walking in garden. They said: ‘’Nice to be home again, but where are the Little Men?’ Slippers said: ‘Lie still, or they will push us into the Empty Places.’ We lay still. Missus called: ‘Where is Slippers?’ Master called: ‘Boots, you ruffian! Hi Boots!’ We lay still. Own Gods came into yard and found. They said: ‘Oh, there you are! Did you think we would forget you? Come-for-walks.’ We came. We said soft. We rolled before feets, asking not to be pushed into Empty Places. I made a Beseech, because I were not comfy. Missus said: ‘Who’d have thought they’d take it this way, poor Little Men?’ Master threw plenty sticks. I picked up and brought back. Slippers went inside with Missus. He came out quick. He said: ‘Hurry! Smallest is being washed.’ I went like rabbits. Smallest was all no-things on top or feets or middle. Nurse, which is Thick, washed and rubbed, and put things on-all-over afterwards. I kissed hind-feet. Slippers too. Both Gods said ‘Look—it tickles him! He laughs. He knows they’re all right!’ Then they said and they said and they kissed and they kissed it, and it was bye-loe—same as ‘kennel-up’—and then dinner, and heads-on-feets under table, and lots things-passed-down. One were kidney, and two was cheeses. We are most fine dogs!

Very many Long Times after those Times. Both Gods have gone-week-ends in kennel-that-moves. But we are not afraid. They will come back. Slippers went up to talk to that Smallest and Nurse. I went to see my great friend Ravager at Walk, because I see him very often. There was new, old, small, white dog outside Barn. There was only one eye. He was dretful bitted all over. His teeth was black. He walked slow. He said: ‘I am Pensioned Hunt Terrier! Behave, you lap-dog!’ I was afraid of his oldness and his crossness. I went paws-up. I told about me and Slippers and Ravager. He said: ‘I know that puppy. I taught him to grow-into-a-hound. I am more dash-old than Royal, his grandfather.’ I said: ‘Is it good Rat? He is my friend. Will he grow-into-a-Hound?’ Hunt Terrier said: ‘That depends.’ He scratched his dretful-bitted neck and looked me out of his eye. I did not feel comfy. I wented into Barn. There was Ravager on Barn floor and two Peoples. One was all white, except his black ends, which was called Moore. One was long, proper man, and nice, which was called m’Lord. Moore-man lifted Ravager’s head and opened his mouth. Proper Man looked. Moore said ‘Look, m’lord. He’s swine-chopped.’ Proper Man said: ‘’Pity! He’s by Romeo and Regan.’ Moore-man said: ‘Yes, and she’s the wisest, worst-tempered bitch ever was.’ Proper Man gave Ravager biscuit. Ravager stood up stiff on toes-very fine dog. Moore said: ‘Romeo’s shoulders. Regan’s feet. It’s a pity, m’lord.’ Proper Man said: ‘And Royal’s depth. ’Great pity. I see. I’ll give you the order about him to-morrow.’

They wented away. Ravager said: ‘Now they will make me grow-into-a-Hound. I will be sent into Kennels, and schooled for cubbing-in-September.’ He went after. Hunt Terrier came and showed black teeth. I said: ‘What is “swine-chopped “?’ He said: ‘Being snipey-about-the nose, stoopid.’ Then Moore came and put Hunt Terrier up on neck, same as Cookey carries Kitchen Cat. Hunt Terrier said: ‘Never walk when you can ride at my time of life.’ They wented away. Me too. But I were not comfy.

When I got home, Nurse and Adar and Cookey were in scullery, all saying loud about Slippers and Kitchen Cat and Smallest. Slippers were sitting in sink—bleedy. Adar turned sink-tap-water on his head. Slippers jumped down and ran. We hid in boot-house. Slippers said: ‘I wented up to see that Smallest. He was bye-loe. I lay under Nurse’s bed. She went down for cup-o’-tea. Kitchen Cat came and jumped into kennel-that-rocks, beside Smallest. I said: “G’out of this! “ She said: “I will sleep here. It is warm.” I said very loud. Kitchen Cat jumped out on floor. I bit her going to the door. She hit. I shook. We fell downstairs into Nurse. Kitchen Cat hit across face. I let go because I did not see. Kitchen Cat said, and Cookey picked up. I said, and Adar picked up, and put me on sink and poured water on bleedy eye. Then they all said. But I am quite well-dog, and it is not washing-day for me.’ I said: ‘Slippers, you are fine dog! I am afraid of Kitchen Cat.’ Slippers said: ‘Me too. But that time I was new dog inside-me. I were ’normous f’rocious big Hound! Now I am Slippers.’

I told about Ravager and Moore and Proper Man and Hunt Terrier and swine-chopped. Slippers said: ‘I cannot see where that Rat will run. I smell it is bad rat. But I must watch my Smallest. It is your Rat to kill.’

Next Time after Not-Comfy. Kitchen Cat is gone away and not come back. Kitchen is not nice to go in. I have went to see my friend Ravager at Walk. He were tied up. He sang sorrowful. He told dretful things. He said: ‘When I were asleep last night, I grew-into-a-Hound—very fine Hound. I went sleep-hunting with ’nother Hound—lemon-and-white Hound. We sleep-hunted ’normous big Fox-Things all through Dark Covers. Then I fell in a pond. There was a heavy thing tied to my neck. I went down and down into pond till it was all dark. I were frightened and I unsleeped. Now I am not comfy.’ I said: ‘Why are you tied-up?’ He said: ‘Mister-Kent has tied me up to wait for Moore.’ I said: ‘That is not my Rat. I will ask Hunt Terrier.’

So I went back into Park. I were uncomfy in all my hairs because of my true friend Ravager. There were hedgehog in ditch. He rounded up. I said loud. Hunt Terrier came out of bushes and pushed him into a wetness. He unrounded. Hunt Terrier killed. I said: ‘You are most wonderful, wise, strong, fine dog.’ He said ‘What bone do you want now, Snipey?’ I said ‘Tell me, what is “snipey-about-the-nose”?’ He said: ‘It is what they kill Hound puppies for, because they cannot eat fast or bite hard. It is being like your nose.’ I said: ‘I can eat and bite hard. I am son of Champion Kildonan Brogue—Reserve—V.H.C.—very-fine-dog.’ Hunt Terrier said: ‘I know that pack. They hunt fleas. What flea is biting you?’ I said ‘Ravager is uncomfy, and I am uncomfy of my friend Ravager.’ He said: ‘You are not so lap-dog as you look. Show me that puppy on the flags.’ So I said about Ravager sleep-hunting and falling in pond, which he had told me when he were tied up. Hunt Terrier said ‘Did he sleep-hunt with a lemon-and-white-bitch with a scar on her left jowl?’ I said ‘He said he hunted with ’nother Hound—lemon-and-white—but he did not say Lady-Hound or jowels. How did you know?’ Hunt Terrier said: ‘I knew last night. It will be dash-near-squeak for Ravager.’

Then we saw Moore on Tall Horse in Park. Hunt Terrier said: ‘He is going to the Master for orders about Ravager. Run!’ I were runnier than Hunt Terrier. He was rude. There was Big House in Park. There was garden and door at side. Moore went in. Hunt Terrier stayed to mind Horse, which was his Tall Friend. I saw Proper Man inside, which had been kind to Ravager at Walk. So I wented in, too. Proper Man said: ‘What’s this, Moore? ’Nother Hunt Terrier?’ Moore said ‘No. m’lord. It’s that little black devil from The Place, that’s always coming over to Kent’s and misleading Ravager.’ Proper Man said ‘No getting away from Ravager this morning, it seems.’ Moore said: ‘No—nor last night either, m’lord.’ Proper Man said: ‘Yes, I heard her.’ Moore said: ‘I’ve come for orders about Ravager, m’lord.’ Proper Man sat look-not-see—same as Master with pipe. I were not comfy. So I sat up on my end, and put paws over nose, and made a big Beseech. That is all I can. Proper Man looked and said: ‘What? Are you in it too, you little oddity?’ Hunt Terrier said outside: ‘No dash-parlour-tricks in there! Come on out of it!’ So I came out and helped mind Tall Horse.

After whiles, Moore came out, and picked up Hunt Terrier, and put him on front-saddle, and hurried. Hunt Terrier said rudenesses about my short legs. When we got to Walk, Moore said loud to Mister-Kent: ‘It is all right.’ Mister-Kent said: ‘’Glad of it. How did it come about?’ Moore said: ‘Regan saved him. She was howling cruel last night; and when his Lordship looked in this morning, she was all over him, playing the kitten and featherin’ and pleadin’. She knew! He didn’t say anything then, but he said to me just now: ‘Ravager will be sent to Kennels with the young entry, and we’ll hope his defect ain’t-too-heredity.’

Mister-Kent untied. Ravager rolled and said and said and played with me. We played I were Fox-at-his-home-among-the-rocks, all round Pig-ladies-houses. I went to ground under hen-house. Hen-ladies said plenty. Hunt Terrier said if he had me for two seasons, he would make me earn-my-keep. But I would not like. I am afraid I would be put-in-ponds and sunk, because I am snipey-about-the-nose. But now I am comfy in all my hairs. I have ate grass and sicked up. I am happy dog.

Most wonderful Times. We are fine dogs. There was Bell-Day, when Master comes black-all-over, and walks slow with shiny box on top and ‘don’t-you-play-with-my-brolly.’ That is always Bell-Day Rat. Nurse put Smallest into push-kennel, and went for walk-in-Park. We went with, and ran, and said lots. We went by Walk all along railings of Park. Ravager heard. He said: ‘I will come. My collar is too big.’ He slipped collar and came with. That Smallest said loud and nice, and waved paw. Ravager looked into push-kennel and kissed Smallest on its face. Nurse shooed and wiped with hanky. Ravager said: ‘Why am I “slobberybeast”? It is not ’ware-Smallest for me.’

We all walked across Park beside push-kennel. There was noise behind bushes. Bull-which-we-played-with-in-yard came out, and digged with paws and waved tail. Nurse said ‘Oh, what shall I do—I do? My legs are wobbly.’ She took Smallest out of push-kennel and ran to railings. Bull walked quick after. We ran in front. Slippers and I said lots. Ravager jumped at his nose and ran. Bull spun. Ravager ran behind push-kennel. Bull hit push-kennel on one side, and kneeled-down-on. Ravager jumped at his nose, and Slippers bit behind. Me too. Bull spun. Ravager ran a little in front. Bull came after to shrubbery. Ravager said: ‘Chop him in cover!’ We chopped, running in and out. Then Ravager bited and jumped back-with-barks before nose. It was fun. Bull got bleedy. Slippers and me said dretful things. Bull ran away into Park and stopped. We said from three places, so he could not choose which. It were great fun.

Peoples called out from railings round Walk. There was Nursey paws-up on ground, kicking feet. There was that Smallest and Own Gods holding tight. There was Mister-Kent-Peoples. Bull said, quite small—like cow-pup. Mister-Kent came and put stick at Bull’s nose and took away on-lead. All the Peoples on the railing said most loud at us. We were frightened, because of chasing-pounds-off-those-calves. We went home other ways. Ravager came with, because he had slipped his collar and was in for Proper-Whack-Whack. I opened dust-bin with my nose-like I can do. There were porridge and herring-tails and outsides of cheeses. It was nice. Then Ravager stuck up his back-hairs most dretful, and said: ‘If I am for Proper Whackings, I will chop Mister-Kent.’ We went with to see.

There was plenty Peoples there, all Bell-Day-black all over. We saw Moore. We saw Mister-Kent. He was bleedy one side his blacks. He blew. He said ‘Ravager’s made a proper hash of him. Look at me Sunday-best!’ Moore said: ‘That shows he ain’t swine-chopped to matter.’ Mister-Kent said: ‘Dam-all-how-it-shows! What about my Bull?’ Moore said ‘Put him down to the Poultry Fund; for if ever Bull cried dung-hill, he did with Ravager.’ Mister-Kent said plenty-lots.

Ravager walked slow round barn and stopped stiff. His back-hairs was like angry Gentlemen-pigs. Mister-Kent began to say dretful. Moore said: ‘Keep away. He has his mother’s temper, and it’s dash-awkward.’ Then Moore said nice small things and patted. Ravager put his head on Moore’s feets, and all his back-hairs lay down and was proper coat again. Moore took him to kennel, and filled water-trough, and turned straw on sleeping-bench. Ravager curled up like small puppy, and kissed hands. Moore said: ‘Let him be till he sees fit to come out. Else there’ll be more hurt than your Bull.’

Slippers and me ran away. We was afraid. We were dretful dirty. My nice frilly drawers was full of sticky burrs, and our front-shirts were bleedy off Bull. So we went to our Adar, but Own Gods and Smallest and Nurse Thick came, and they all said and said and petted, except Cookey because Kitchen Cat is not come back. There was wonderful things-under-table at dinner. One was liver. One was cheese-straw and one was sardine. Afterwards, was coffee-sugar. We wcnted up to see Smallest bye-loed. He is quite well. We are most fine dogs. Own Gods keep saying so. It are fun!

Just after that Times. There is no more Ravager at Walk. I have wented to see him. Moore came with Tall Horse and cracky-whip and took. Ravager showed very proud dog inside (he said), but outside frightened puppy. He said I were his true friend in spite of my little legs. He said he will come again when he is grown-into-a-Hound, and I will always be his True Small Friend. He went looking back, but Moore cracked whip. Ravager sung dretful. I heard him all down the lane after I could see. I am sorrowful dog, but I am always friend of my friend Ravager. Slippers came to meet me at Rabbit Holes. We got muddy on tum, because we have low clearances. So we went to our Adar for clean.

Kitchen Cat was on Wall again. Slippers said: ‘Give her cold-dead-rat.’ We wented-past-under quite still. She said: ‘I am Kitchen Cat come back, silly little pups!’ We did not say or look. We went to Adar. Slippers said me: ‘Now we hunt Bulls in Parks, do not ever say to Kitchen Cat—ever!’ I said: ‘Good rat! You are wise dog.’ Cookey picked up and said: ‘Mee own precious Pussums!’ Kitchen Cat said: ‘I am Cat, not Dog, drat you!’ Cookey kept on petting. Then she tied up by basket in kitchen, and said: ‘Now you’ve had your lesson about going up to the nursery, you’ll stay with me in future and behave!’ Kitchen Cat spitted. Cookey took broom in case we hunted; but we went past quite still. This is finish to Kitchen Cat. We are fine dogs. We hunt Bulls. She does not hunt real rats. She is Bad! Bad! Bad!

Most Wonderful Times. This is me—Boots. Three years old. I am ’sponsible dog (Slippers, too), Master says. We are ’sponsible for that Smallest. He can get out of push-kennel. He walks puppy-way between Slippers and me. He holds by ears and noses. When he sits down, he pulls up same way. He says: ‘Boo-boo!’ That is me. He says: ‘See-see!’ That is Slippers. He has bitted both our tails to make his teeth grow strong, because he has no bone at night. We did not say. He has come into both our kennels, and tried to eat our biscuit. Nurse found. There was smallest Whack-Whacks. He did not say. He is finest Smallest that is.

He had washings and new collar and extra brush. It was not Bell-Day. It was after last-run-of-season. He walked on lawn. We came, one each side. He held. There was horns in Park. I were tingly in all my hairs. But I did not say. (’Too old to make-fool-of-myself, my time of life, Master says.) There was Hounds and Pinks coming on grass. There was Moore—but he was Pinks. There was Mister-Kent. But he was like rat-catcher, Hunt Terrier said. There was nice Proper Man which was kind to Ravager in barn about being swine-chopped. There was some more Pinks, but not friends. Moore took all Hounds to gate by lawn. They sat down quiet. They was beautiful muddy, and seeds in coats and tails, and ears bleedy. Hunt Terrier sat in own basket on Tall Horse. When Moore put him down he said dretful things to Hounds. They did not say back. Proper Man said to Master and Missus: ‘We have come to call with brush for that Smallest.’

Smallest liked because it tickled; but Nurse Thick washed off with hanky quick. Master-an’-Missus said: ‘How did Ravager do?’ Proper Man said: ‘As usual. ’Led from end to end. He wants to talk to you.’ Ravager stood up tall at the gate and put nose through. Smallest stretched out and Ravager kissed. Then Moore said: ‘Over, lad!’ Ravager overed in one jump, and said to Smallest, two times most loud, like Bell-Day, and played puppy very careful, and let Smallest hold by ears. His ears was all made round.

He spoke me. I went paws-up, because he were so big and dretful and strong. He said ‘Drop it, Stoopid! ’Member me bein’ lost? ’Member Bucket and Fishheads? ’Member Bull? ’Member Cow-pups and Lady-pigs and Mister-Kent and Proper Whackings and all those things at Walk? You are True Sporting Dog, except only because of your little legs, and always true friend of Ravager.’ He rolled me over, and held down with paws, and play-bit in my neck. I play-bitted him too, right on jowels! All the Hounds saw! I walked round stiff-on-toes, most proud.

Then Hunt Terrier wiggled under gate without leave. Proper Man said to Missus: ‘He is pensioned now, but it would break his heart not to turn out with the rest. He can’t hurt your dogs, poor fellow.’ Hunt Terrier walked-on-toes round me and showed black teeth. I went paws-up, because he were old and dretful about knowing Uncomfy things. He said: ‘I will let you off this time, Snipey, because you knew about Ravager sleep-hunting in Dark Covers. ’Dash narrow shave, that! Now I must go and look after the young entry. Not one-dash-Hound among ’em!’

He went away and bitted at an old Lady-Hound, lemon-and-white, with black bites on jowels. She said, and wrinkled nose dretful, but she did not chop. She sat and looked at Ravager through gate, and said to him—like Bell-Day, but more loud. Proper Man said: ‘Old Regan wants her tea. ’Fraid we must be going.’ They wented away. There was horns and Horses and Pinks, and Hounds jumping up, and Moore saying names loud, and Ravager overed gate most beautiful. They wented all away—all—all. I were very small little dog.

Then Smallest said: ‘Boo-boo!’ ‘See-see!’ He took necks by collars. He said to Own Gods: ‘Look! Look! Own ’ounds! Own ’ounds! Turn on tea, ’ounds.’ . . .

Please, that is finish for now of all about me-and-Slippers. I make Beseech!