was marched
in the Pribawn boys. Faith, he had them well regulated. Very nate they
marched, very nate entirely. They never were in such rotation!"

The voter bent melancholy and slightly bloodshot eyes upon Christian,
and awaited her reply.

Christian, with her usual miscellaneous company of dogs, was on her
way to visit a woman whose husband had died not long before. Her way
took her along the banks of the Broadwater, and during one of the
frequent pauses, necessitated by the investigations into the private
affairs of water-rats and others, made by her companions, she and
Peter Callaghan had exchanged greetings. He and Christian had fallen
into talk, with the absence of formality that is, perhaps, peculiar to
intercourse between his class and hers. He leant upon his scythe, and
discoursed seriously and courteously. He wore a soft, slouched black
hat, that did not wholly conceal his thick and curly hair, in which
there was scarcely a grey strand, though he was, as he told Christian,
the one age with her father. His white flannel jacket was wrapped
round him, its skirts pushed under the band of his brown frieze
trousers. A red wisp of rag was knotted round his middle, and held all
together. His pale grey and wistful eyes looked at Christian from
above a tangled thicket of grizzled moustache and beard. He suggested
almost equally, a conventional Saint Joseph and a stage-brigand--a
brigand, as it might be, who had joined the Salvation Army. "As old as
I am," he returned, dreamily, to the affair of the morning, "I stepped
it away with them!"

He turned his eyes from Christian's face to the large and sliding
brightness of the river.

There followed a moment of silence that was filled by the yelps of the
little dogs who had marked a water-rat to ground, and the
hobble-de-hoy shouts of the hound puppies, uttered with no definite
idea of the cause of their enthusiasm, but none the less enthusiastic
for that reason.

"Are you the youngest young lady, I beg your pardon?" Peter Callaghan
asked presently. "It's long since I seen you. Your father knows me
well. I remember of one time when the hounds was crossing my land, and
I seen yourself and your sisther taking the hur'ls. I cries out to ye
'me heart'd rise at ye, my darlins!' and the Major, he laughs!"

"I remember jumping the hurdles," said Christian; "I'll tell my father
I met you."

"He gave me permission to cut the 'looha' in these fields," resumed
Peter Callaghan