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 the finest, Peter thinks, he’s ever had—and you know that’s saying something!” She goes over to the water-race that here, close to the house, runs right across the path beneath a miniature bridge of planking, and drops her tins beside it; there they lie and twinkle to the sun from the fresh grass; treacle-tins I see they are, with the paper label scoured off them, and a bit of wire set in as handle—just the thing for watering the coops.

“Peter’s gone to town,” continues Peter’s wife. “We’d two dozen wethers ready, and he’ll see if he can get his price; if he can’t, of course he’ll just bring ’em back again. Isn’t it a blessing stock still keeps so high? Now, come you in, and get a cup of tea.” For to that colonial weakness, a cup of tea at all hours, I am sorry to say Mrs. Catherine took most kindly from the start.

So in we go, to the little clean, bare kitchen, with all its litter of work under way (what a difference there is between such busy, “still-alive” litter and mere left-over untidiness!) and before long are drinking hot tea, and eating puffy brown fried scones with home-made apple jelly. To these delights we may sit down, but our hostess, excusing herself on the plea that, being a farmer’s wife, she must needs be every moment busy, moves about the kitchen cup in hand, attending to twenty little odd jobs: setting milk upon the stove to warm, chopping up firm white skim-milk curd to mix in with the fowl-feed, stirring up Shot’s daily cake of oatmeal, to be fried, presently, in hot mutton-fat: tidying here, rearranging there, and talking all the time. It is always a treat to Catherine, brought up as she was in the bustle of a town, and inevitably missing