d
settles, some framed samplers, and an old print or two, and a bookcase
with some dozen volumes on the walls, a rack with flitches of bacon, and
other stores fastened to the ceiling, and you have the best part of the
furniture. No sign of occult art is to be seen, unless the bundles of
dried herbs hanging to the rack and in the ingle and the row of labelled
phials on one of the shelves betoken it.

Tom played about with some kittens who occupied the hearth, and with a
goat who walked demurely in at the open door--while their host and Benjy
spread the table for dinner--and was soon engaged in conflict with the
cold meat, to which he did much honour. The two old men's talk was of
old comrades and their deeds, mute inglorious Miltons of the Vale, and
of the doings thirty years back, which didn't interest him much, except
when they spoke of the making of the canal; and then indeed he began to
listen with all his ears, and learned, to his no small wonder, that his
dear and wonderful canal had not been there always--was not, in fact,
so old as Benjy or Farmer Ives, which caused a strange commotion in his
small brain.

After dinner Benjy called attention to a wart which Tom had on the
knuckles of his hand, and which the family doctor had been trying his
skill on without success, and begged the farmer to charm it away. Farmer
Ives looked at it, muttered something or another over it, and cut
some notches in a short stick, which he handed to Benjy, giving him
instructions for cutting it down on certain days, and cautioning Tom not
to meddle with the wart for a fortnight. And then they strolled out and
sat on a bench in the sun with their pipes, and the pigs came up and
grunted sociably and let Tom scratch them; and the farmer, seeing how he
liked animals, stood up and held his arms in the air, and gave a call,
which brought a flock of pigeons wheeling and dashing through the
birch-trees. They settled down in clusters on the farmer's arms and
shoulders, making love to him and scrambling over one another's backs
to get to his face; and then he threw them all off, and they fluttered
about close by, and lighted on him again and again when he held up his
arms. All the creatures about the place were clean and fearless, quite
unlike their relations elsewhere; and Tom begged to be taught how to
make all the pigs and cows and poultry in our village tame, at which the
farmer only gave one of his grim chuckles.

It wasn't till they were