Page:Lorna Doone - a romance of Exmoor (IA lornadooneromanc691blac).pdf/115

 And again, which is not a bad proverb, though unthrifty and unlike a Scotsman's—

And no Devonshire man, or Somerset either (and I belong to both of them), ever thinks of working harder than God likes to see him.

Nevertheless I worked hard at the gun, and by the time that I had sent all the church-roof gutters, so far as I honestly could cut them, through the red pinedoor, I began to long for a better tool that would make less noise and throw straighter. But the sheep-shearing came, and the hay-season next, and then the harvest of small corn, and the digging of the root called "batata" (a new but good thing in our neighbourhood, which our folk have made into "taties"), and then the sweating of the apples, and the turning of the cider-press, and the stacking of the fire-wood, and netting of the woodcocks, and the springles to be minded in the garden and by the hedgerows, where blackbirds hop to the molehills in the white October mornings, and grey birds come to look for snails at the time when the sun is rising.

It is wonderful how time runs away, when all these things and a great many others come in to load him down the hill and prevent him from stopping to look about. And I for my part can never conceive, how people who live in towns and cities, where neither lambs nor birds are (except in some shop-windows), nor growing corn, nor meadow-grass, nor even so much