. But next to these he liked Thomasina's stories.

Thomasina was kind to him. With all his failings and the dirt on his
boots, she liked him better than the farm-bailiff. The farm-bailiff was
thrifty, and sensible and faithful, and Thomasina was faithful and
sensible and thrifty, and they each had a tendency to claim the monopoly
of those virtues. Notable people complain, very properly, of thriftless
and untidy ones, but they sometimes agree better with them than with
rival notabilities. And so Thomasina's broad face beamed benevolently as
she bid the cowherd "draw up" to the fire, and he who (like Thomasina)
was a native of the country, would confirm the marvels she related, with
a proper pride in the wonderful district to which they both belonged.

He would help her out sometimes with names and dates in a local
biography. By his own account he knew the man who was murdered at the
inn in the Black Valley so intimately that it turned Annie the lass as
white as a dish-cloth to sit beside him. If Thomasina said that folk
were yet alive who had seen the little green men dance in Dawborough
Croft the cowherd would smack his knees and cry, "Scores on 'em!" And
when she whispered of the white figure which stood at the cross roads
after midnight, he testified to having seen it himself--tall beyond
mortal height, and pointing four ways at once. He had a legend of his
own too, which Thomasina sometimes gave him the chance of telling, of
how he was followed home one moonlight night by a black Something as big
as a young calf, which "wimmled and wammled," around him till he fell
senseless into the ditch, and being found there by the farm-bailiff on
his return from market was unjustly accused of the vice of intoxication.

"Fault-finders should be free of flaws," Thomasina would say with a prim
chin. She _had_ seen the farm-bailiff himself "the worse" for more than
his supper beer.

But there was one history which Thomasina was always loth to relate, and
it was that which both John Broom and the cowherd especially
preferred--the history of the Lob Lie-by-the-fire.

Thomasina had a feeling (which was shared by Annie the lass) that it was
better not to talk of "anything" peculiar to the house in which you were
living. One's neighbours' ghosts and bogles are another matter.

But to John Broom and the cowherd no subject was so interesting as that
of the Lubber-fiend. The cowherd sighed to think of the good old times
when a man migh