"It don't feel like home any longer, and
my poor flesh is shivering like a jelly, and my hand almost too hot
to make the butter." She kept up this lidden all through breakfast,
and the meal was no sooner cleared away than she slipped on a shawl
and stepped across to the churchyard to discuss the robbery.
The Parson drew a chair to the window, lit his pipe, and pulled out
his pocket-Bible to choose a text for his next day's sermon. But he
couldn't fix his thoughts. Try how he would, they kept harking back
to his travels in the post-chaise, and his wife's story, and those
unaccountable flags and splashes of whitewash. His pipe went out,
and he was getting up to find a light for it, when just at that
moment the garden gate rattled, and, looking down the path towards
the sound, his eyes fell on a square-cut, fierce-looking man in blue,
standing there with a dirty bag in one hand and a sheaf of tools over
his right shoulder.
The man caught sight of the Parson at the window, and set down his
tools inside the gate--shovel and pick and biddicks.
"Good-mornin'! I may come inside, I suppose?" says he, in a gruff
tone of voice. He came up the path and the Parson unlatched the
window, which was one of the long sort reaching down to the ground.
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