ike Emma, to get her to talk of the days
that had been; her shrill, quavering speech was of doors that had been
left unfastened, pails that had got mislaid, calves whose feeding-time
was overdue, and the various little faults and lapses that chequer a
farmhouse routine. Now and again, when election time came round, she
would unstore her recollections of the old names round which the fight
had waged in the days gone by. There had been a Palmerston, that had
been a name down Tiverton way; Tiverton was not a far journey as the crow
flies, but to Martha it was almost a foreign country. Later there had
been Northcotes and Aclands, and many other newer names that she had
forgotten; the names changed, but it was always Libruls and Toories,
Yellows and Blues. And they always quarrelled and shouted as to who was
right and who was wrong. The one they quarrelled about most was a fine
old gentleman with an angry face--she had seen his picture on the walls.
She had seen it on the floor too, with a rotten apple squashed over it,
for the farm had changed its politics from time to time. Martha had
never been on one side or the other; none of "they" had ever done the
farm a stroke of good. Such was her sweeping verdict, given with all a
peasant's distrust of the outside world.

When the half-frightened curiosity had somewhat faded away, Emma Ladbruk
was uncomfortably conscious of another feeling towards the old woman. She
was a quaint old tradition, lingering about the place, she was part and
parcel of the farm itself, she was something at once pathetic and
picturesque--but she was dreadfully in the way. Emma had come to the
farm full of plans for little reforms and improvements, in part the
result of training in the newest ways and methods, in part the outcome of
her own ideas and fancies. Reforms in the kitchen region, if those deaf
old ears could have been induced to give them even a hearing, would have
met with short shrift and scornful rejection, and the kitchen region
spread over the zone of dairy and market business and half the work of
the household. Emma, with the latest science of dead-poultry dressing at
her finger-tips, sat by, an unheeded watcher, while old Martha trussed
the chickens for the market-stall as she had trussed them for nearly
fourscore years--all leg and no breast. And the hundred hints anent
effective cleaning and labour-lightening and the things that make for
wholesomeness which the young woman wa