and said, "Come again, come again!"

"Aye, think o' that now," said Mr. Poyser, when Adam was out of on the
causeway. "Sitting up till past twelve to do extry work! Ye'll not find
many men o' six-an' twenty as 'ull do to put i' the shafts wi' him.
If you can catch Adam for a husband, Hetty, you'll ride i' your own
spring-cart some day, I'll be your warrant."

Hetty was moving across the kitchen with the currants, so her uncle did
not see the little toss of the head with which she answered him. To ride
in a spring-cart seemed a very miserable lot indeed to her now.

Chapter XXI

The Night-School and the Schoolmaster

Bartle Massey's was one of a few scattered houses on the edge of a
common, which was divided by the road to Treddleston. Adam reached it
in a quarter of an hour after leaving the Hall Farm; and when he had his
hand on the door-latch, he could see, through the curtainless window,
that there were eight or nine heads bending over the desks, lighted by
thin dips.

When he entered, a reading lesson was going forward and Bartle Massey
merely nodded, leaving him to take his place where he pleased. He had
not come for the sake of a lesson to-night, and his mind was too full
of personal matters, too full of the last two hours he had passed in
Hetty's presence, for him to amuse himself with a book till school was
over; so he sat down in a corner and looked on with an absent mind. It
was a sort of scene which Adam had beheld almost weekly for years; he
knew by heart every arabesque flourish in the framed specimen of Bartle
Massey's handwriting which hung over the schoolmaster's head, by way of
keeping a lofty ideal before the minds of his pupils; he knew the backs
of all the books on the shelf running along the whitewashed wall above
the pegs for the slates; he knew exactly how many grains were gone out
of the ear of Indian corn that hung from one of the rafters; he had long
ago exhausted the resources of his imagination in trying to think
how the bunch of leathery seaweed had looked and grown in its native
element; and from the place where he sat, he could make nothing of the
old map of England that hung against the opposite wall, for age had
turned it of a fine yellow brown, something like that of a well-seasoned
meerschaum. The drama that was going on was almost as familiar as the
scene, nevertheless habit had not made him indifferent to it, and even
in his present self-absorbed mood, Adam felt a moment