Page:Lorna Doone - a romance of Exmoor (IA lornadooneromanc691blac).pdf/80

 a pot of brewis, and scarce knows a tongue from a ham, John, and says it makes no difference, because both are good to eat! Oh, Betty, what do you think of that to come of all her book-learning?"

"Thank God he can't say that of me," Betty answered shortly, for she never cared about argument, except on her own side; "Thank he, I says, every marnin a'most, never to lead me astray so. Men is desaving, and so is galanies; but the most desaving of all is books, with their heads and tails, and the speckots in 'em, lik a peg as have taken the maisles. Some folk purtends to laugh and cry over them. God forgive them for liars!"

It was part of Betty's obstinacy that she never would believe in reading or the possibility of it, but stoutly maintained to the very last that people first learned things by heart, and then pretended to make them out from patterns done upon paper, for the sake of astonishing honest folk, just as do the conjurors. And even to see the parson and clerk was not enough to convince her; all she said was, "it made no odds, they were all the same as the rest of us." And now that she had been on the farm nigh upon forty years, and had nursed my father, and made his clothes, and all that he had to eat, and then put him in his coffin, she was come to such authority, that it was not worth the wages of the best man on the place to say a word in answer to Betty, even if he would face the risk to have ten for one, or twenty.

Annie was her love and joy. For Annie she would