can't be easy a-making your own bed an' leaving the
rest to lie on the stones. Nay, nay, I'll never slip my neck out o' the
yoke, and leave the load to be drawn by the weak uns. Father's a sore
cross to me, an's likely to be for many a long year to come. What then?
I've got th' health, and the limbs, and the sperrit to bear it."

At this moment a smart rap, as if with a willow wand, was given at the
house door, and Gyp, instead of barking, as might have been expected,
gave a loud howl. Adam, very much startled, went at once to the door
and opened it. Nothing was there; all was still, as when he opened it
an hour before; the leaves were motionless, and the light of the stars
showed the placid fields on both sides of the brook quite empty of
visible life. Adam walked round the house, and still saw nothing except
a rat which darted into the woodshed as he passed. He went in again,
wondering; the sound was so peculiar that the moment he heard it it
called up the image of the willow wand striking the door. He could not
help a little shudder, as he remembered how often his mother had told
him of just such a sound coming as a sign when some one was dying. Adam
was not a man to be gratuitously superstitious, but he had the blood of
the peasant in him as well as of the artisan, and a peasant can no
more help believing in a traditional superstition than a horse can help
trembling when he sees a camel. Besides, he had that mental combination
which is at once humble in the region of mystery and keen in the region
of knowledge: it was the depth of his reverence quite as much as
his hard common sense which gave him his disinclination to doctrinal
religion, and he often checked Seth's argumentative spiritualism by
saying, "Eh, it's a big mystery; thee know'st but little about it." And
so it happened that Adam was at once penetrating and credulous. If a
new building had fallen down and he had been told that this was a divine
judgment, he would have said, "May be; but the bearing o' the roof and
walls wasn't right, else it wouldn't ha' come down"; yet he believed
in dreams and prognostics, and to his dying day he bated his breath a
little when he told the story of the stroke with the willow wand. I
tell it as he told it, not attempting to reduce it to its natural
elements--in our eagerness to explain impressions, we often lose our
hold of the sympathy that comprehends them.

But he had the best antidote against imaginative dread in the