RILLA FARM.

The way was long, the sun was hot, the minstrel (as surely he may be
called who carries a musical box) was more than once in two minds about
turning back. He perspired under his absurdly superfluous burden.

To be sure he might--for Troy is always neighbourly--have knocked in at
some cottage on his way through the tail-end of the town and deposited
the box, promising to return for it. But he was flurried, pressed for
time, disgracefully behind time, in fact; and, moreover, thanks to his
attire and changed appearance, no friendly face had smiled recognition
though he had recognised some half a dozen. There was no time to stop,
renew old acquaintance, ask a small favour with explanations. . . .
All this was natural enough: yet he felt an increasing sense of human
selfishness, human ingratitude--he, toiling along with this token of
human gratitude under his arm!

At the extreme end of the town his way led him through the entrance of a
wooded valley, or coombe, down which a highroad, a rushing stream, and a
railway line descend into Troy Harbour, more or less in parallels, from
the outside world. A creek runs some little way up the vale. In old
days--in Captain Cai's young days--it ran up for half a mile or more to
an embanked mill-pool and a mill-wheel lazily turning: and Rilla Farm
had in those days been Rilla Mill, with a farmstead attached as the
miller's _parergon_.

But the railway had swept away mill-pool and wheel: and Rilla was now
Rilla Farm. The railway, too, cutting sheer through the slope over
which the farmstead stood, had transformed shelving turf to rocky cliff
and farmstead to eyrie. You approached Rilla now by a footbridge
crossing the line, and thereafter by a winding pathway climbing the
cliff, with here and there a few steps hewn in the living rock. Nature
in some twenty odd years had draped the cliff with fern--the _Polypodium
vulgare_--and Mrs Bosenna in her early married days had planted the
crevices with arabis, alyssum, and aubrietia, which had taken root and
spread, and now, overflowing their ledges, ran down in cascades of
bloom--white, yellow, and purple. The ascent, in short, was very pretty
and romantic, and you might easily imagine it the approach to some
foreign hill-castle or monastery: for the farmhouse on the summit hid
itself behind out-buildings the walls of which crowned the escarpment
and presented a blank face, fortress-like, overlooking the vale.
The p