teady fire,
and not a furnace.'

'Oh, I quite agree with John, Martha: we must take the good and the evil
in a world like this.'

'Then I'm no scholar, and you're at ease,' said John.

Mrs. Waddy put her mouth to his ear.

Up went his eyebrows, wrinkling arches over a petrified stare.

In some way she had regained her advantage. 'Art sure of it?' he
inquired.

'Pray, don't offend me by expressing a doubt of it,' she replied,
bowing.

John Thresher poised me in the very centre of his gaze. He declared he
would never have guessed that, and was reproved, inasmuch as he might
have guessed it. He then said that I could not associate with any of
the children thereabout, and my dwelling in the kitchen was not to
be thought of. The idea of my dwelling in the kitchen seemed to be a
serious consideration with Mrs. Martha likewise. I was led into the
rooms of state. The sight of them was enough. I stamped my feet for the
kitchen, and rarely in my life have been happier than there, dining and
supping with John and Martha and the farm-labourers, expecting my father
across the hills, and yet satisfied with the sun. To hope, and not be
impatient, is really to believe, and this was my feeling in my father's
absence. I knew he would come, without wishing to hurry him. He had the
world beyond the hills; I this one, where a slow full river flowed from
the sounding mill under our garden wall, through long meadows. In Winter
the wild ducks made letters of the alphabet flying. On the other side of
the copses bounding our home, there was a park containing trees old as
the History of England, John Thresher said, and the thought of their
venerable age enclosed me comfortably. He could not tell me whether he
meant as old as the book of English History; he fancied he did, for the
furrow-track follows the plough close upon; but no one exactly could
swear when that (the book) was put together. At my suggestion, he fixed
the trees to the date of the Heptarchy, a period of heavy ploughing.
Thus begirt by Saxon times, I regarded Riversley as a place of extreme
baldness, a Greenland, untrodden by my Alfred and my Harold. These
heroes lived in the circle of Dipwell, confidently awaiting the arrival
of my father. He sent me once a glorious letter. Mrs. Waddy took one of
John Thresher's pigeons to London, and in the evening we beheld the bird
cut the sky like an arrow, bringing round his neck a letter warm
from him I loved. Planet communicating w