anywhere. Upon the few fishermen who gave up hope of sleep, and came
to stand dazed in their doorways, the glare of white walls and chalky
stones, and dusty roads, produced the same effect as if they had put on
their fathers' goggles. Therefore they yawned their way back to their
room, and poked up the fire, without which, at Flamborough, no hot
weather would be half hot enough.

The children, however, were wide-awake, and so were the washer-women,
whose turn it had been to sleep last night for the labors of the
morning. These were plying hand and tongue in a little field by the
three cross-roads, where gaffers and gammers of by-gone time had set up
troughs of proven wood, and the bilge of a long storm-beaten boat, near
a pool of softish water. Stout brown arms were roped with curd, and
wedding rings looked slippery things, and thumb-nails bordered with
inveterate black, like broad beans ripe for planting, shone through a
hubbub of snowy froth; while sluicing and wringing and rinsing went on
over the bubbled and lathery turf; and every handy bush or stub, and
every tump of wiry grass, was sheeted with white, like a ship in full
sail, and shining in the sun-glare.

From time to time these active women glanced back at their cottages,
to see that the hearth was still alive, or at their little daughters
squatting under the low wall which kept them from the road, where they
had got all the babies to nurse, and their toes and other members to
compare, and dandelion chains to make. But from their washing ground the
women could not see the hill that brings to the bottom of the village
the crooked road from Sewerby. Down that hill came a horseman slowly,
with nobody to notice him, though himself on the watch for everybody;
and there in the bottom below the first cottage he allowed his horse to
turn aside and cool hot feet and leathery lips, in a brown pool spread
by Providence for the comfort of wayworn roadsters.

The horse looked as if he had labored far, while his rider was calmly
resting; for the cross-felled sutures of his flank were crusted with
gray perspiration, and the runnels of his shoulders were dabbled; and
now it behooved him to be careful how he sucked the earthy-flavored
water, so as to keep time with the heaving of his barrel. In a word,
he was drinking as if he would burst--as his hostler at home often told
him--but the clever old roadster knew better than that, and timing it
well between snorts and coughs, w