, here's yours--finish thanking me in a day or two.
Temperance Miller--oh, here's another, Soberness--both women I
suppose?"

"Yes'm. Here we be, 'a b'lieve," was echoed in shrill unison.

"What have you been doing?"

"Tending thrashing-machine and wimbling haybonds, and saying 'Hoosh!'
to the cocks and hens when they go upon your seeds, and planting
Early Flourballs and Thompson's Wonderfuls with a dibble."

"Yes--I see. Are they satisfactory women?" she inquired softly of
Henery Fray.

"Oh mem--don't ask me! Yielding women--as scarlet a pair as ever
was!" groaned Henery under his breath.

"Sit down."

"Who, mem?"

"Sit down."

Joseph Poorgrass, in the background twitched, and his lips became
dry with fear of some terrible consequences, as he saw Bathsheba
summarily speaking, and Henery slinking off to a corner.

"Now the next. Laban Tall, you'll stay on working for me?"

"For you or anybody that pays me well, ma'am," replied the young
married man.

"True--the man must live!" said a woman in the back quarter, who had
just entered with clicking pattens.

"What woman is that?" Bathsheba asked.

"I be his lawful wife!" continued the voice with greater prominence
of manner and tone. This lady called herself five-and-twenty, looked
thirty, passed as thirty-five, and was forty. She was a woman who
never, like some newly married, showed conjugal tenderness in public,
perhaps because she had none to show.

"Oh, you are," said Bathsheba. "Well, Laban, will you stay on?"

"Yes, he'll stay, ma'am!" said again the shrill tongue of Laban's
lawful wife.

"Well, he can speak for himself, I suppose."

"Oh Lord, not he, ma'am! A simple tool. Well enough, but a poor
gawkhammer mortal," the wife replied.

"Heh-heh-heh!" laughed the married man with a hideous effort of
appreciation, for he was as irrepressibly good-humoured under ghastly
snubs as a parliamentary candidate on the hustings.

The names remaining were called in the same manner.

"Now I think I have done with you," said Bathsheba, closing the book
and shaking back a stray twine of hair. "Has William Smallbury
returned?"

"No, ma'am."

"The new shepherd will want a man under him," suggested Henery Fray,
trying to make himself official again by a sideway approach towards
her chair.

"Oh--he will. Who can he have?"

"Young Cain Ball is a very good lad," Henery said, "and Shepherd Oak
don't mind his youth?" he added, turning with an a