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 level landscape compounded of old landscapes long forgotten, and, no doubt, differing in character very greatly from the landscape they composed now.

‘To my thinking,’ said the dairyman, rising suddenly from a cow he had just finished off, snatching up his three-legged stool in one hand and the pail in the other, and moving on to the next hard-yielder in his vicinity; ‘to my thinking, the cows don’t gie down their milk to-day as usual. Upon my life, if Winker do begin keeping back like this, she’ll not be worth going under by midsummer.’

‘Tis because there’s a new hand come among us,’ said Jonathan Kail, ‘I’ve noticed such things afore.’

‘To be sure. It may be so. I didn’t think o’t.’

‘I’ve been told that it goes up into their horns at such times,’ said a dairymaid.

‘Well, as to going up into their horns,’ replied Dairyman Crick dubiously, as though even witchcraft might be limited by anatomical possibilities, ‘I couldn’t say; I certainly could not. But as nott cows will keep it back as well as the horned ones, I don’t quite agree to it. Do ye know that