to have her feet looked at, and to be new shod.
On his way from the town he had met Kinraid wandering about in
search of Haytersbank Farm itself, so he had just brought him along
with him; and here they were, ready for bread and cheese, and aught
else the mistress would set before them.

To Sylvia the sudden change into brightness and bustle occasioned by
the entrance of her father and the specksioneer was like that which
you may effect any winter's night, when you come into a room where a
great lump of coal lies hot and slumbering on the fire; just break
it up with a judicious blow from the poker, and the room, late so
dark, and dusk, and lone, is full of life, and light, and warmth.

She moved about with pretty household briskness, attending to all
her father's wants. Kinraid's eye watched her as she went backwards
and forwards, to and fro, into the pantry, the back-kitchen, out of
light into shade, out of the shadow into the broad firelight where
he could see and note her appearance. She wore the high-crowned
linen cap of that day, surmounting her lovely masses of golden brown
hair, rather than concealing them, and tied firm to her head by a
broad blue ribbon. A long curl hung down on each side of her neck--her
throat rather, for her neck was concealed by a little spotted
handkerchief carefully pinned across at the waist of her brown stuff
gown.

How well it was, thought the young girl, that she had doffed her
bed-gown and linsey-woolsey petticoat, her working-dress, and made
herself smart in her stuff gown, when she sate down to work with her
mother.

By the time she could sit down again, her father and Kinraid had
their glasses filled, and were talking of the relative merits of
various kinds of spirits; that led on to tales of smuggling, and the
different contrivances by which they or their friends had eluded the
preventive service; the nightly relays of men to carry the goods
inland; the kegs of brandy found by certain farmers whose horses had
gone so far in the night, that they could do no work the next day;
the clever way in which certain women managed to bring in prohibited
goods; in fact, that when a woman did give her mind to smuggling,
she was more full of resources, and tricks, and impudence, and
energy than any man. There was no question of the morality of the
affair; one of the greatest signs of the real progress we have made
since those times seems to be that our daily concerns of buying and
sellin