urn now, and do thee go to bed."

"No, lad; I'd rather go on, now I'm in harness. The coffin's promised to
be ready at Brox'on by seven o'clock to-morrow morning. I'll call thee
up at sunrise, to help me to carry it when it's done. Go and eat thy
supper and shut the door, so as I mayn't hear mother's talk."

Adam worked throughout the night, thinking of his childhood and its
happy days, and then of the days of sadness that came later when his
father began to loiter at public-houses, and Lisbeth began to cry at
home. He remembered well the night of shame and anguish when he first
saw his father quite wild and foolish.

The two brothers set off in the early sunlight, carrying the long coffin
on their shoulders. By six o'clock they had reached Broxton, and were on
their way home.

When they were coming across the valley, and had entered the pasture
through which the brook ran, Seth said suddenly, beginning to walk
faster, "Why, what's that sticking against the willow?"

They both ran forward, and dragged the tall, heavy body out of the
water; and then looked with mute awe at the glazed eyes--forgetting
everything but that their father lay dead before them.

Adam's mind rushed back over the past in a flood of relenting and pity.
Only a few hours ago, and the gray-haired father, of whom he had been
thinking with a sort of hardness as certain to live to be a thorn in his
side, was perhaps even then struggling with that watery death!

_II.--The Hall Farm_

It is a very fine old place of red brick, the Hall Farm--once the
residence of a country squire, and the Hall.

Plenty of life there, though this is the drowsiest time of the year,
just before hay-harvest; and it is the drowsiest time of the day, too,
for it is half-past three by Mrs. Poyser's handsome eight-day clock.

Mrs. Poyser, a good-looking woman, not more than eight-and-thirty, of
fair complexion and sandy hair, well shaped, light-footed, had just
taken up her knitting, and was seated with her niece, Dinah Morris.
Another motherless niece, Hetty Sorrel, a distractingly pretty girl of
seventeen, was busy in the adjoining dairy.

"You look the image o' your aunt Judith, Dinah, when you sit a-sewing,"
said Mrs. Poyser. "I allays said that o' Judith, as she'd bear a pound
weight any day to save anybody else carrying a ounce. And it made no
difference in her, as I could see, when she took to the Methodists; only
she talked a bit different, and wore a diffe