ned his furrows. Sometimes he sung in a drawling tone--

"Bonny lass, canny lass, wilta be mine?
Thou's nowder wesh dishes nor sarra the swine."

At the turn-rows he paused, and rested on his plow handles. He rested
longest at the turn-rows on the roadside of the field. Like the
shivering mists that grouped about the open doors, he was held there by
light and warmth.

The smithy stood at the opposite side of the road, cut into the rock of
the fell on three sides, and having a roof of thatch. The glare of the
fire, now rising, now falling, streamed through the open door. It sent a
long vista of light through the blank and pulsating haze. The vibrations
of the anvil were all but the only sounds on the air; the alternate thin
clink of the smith's hand-hammer and the thick thud of the striker's
sledge echoed in unseen recesses of the hills beyond.

This smithy of Newlands filled the function which under a higher
propitiousness of circumstance is answered by a club. Girded with his
leather apron, his sleeves rolled tightly over his knotty arms, the
smith, John Proudfoot, stood waiting for his heat. His striker, Geordie
Moore, had fallen to at the bellows. On the tool chest sat Gubblum
Oglethorpe, leisurely smoking. His pony was tied to the hasp of the
gate. The miller, Dick of the Syke, sat on a pile of iron rods. Tom o'
Dint, the little bow-legged fiddler and postman, was sharpening at the
grindstone a penknife already worn obliquely to a point by many similar
applications.

"Nay, I can make nowt of him. He's a changed man for sure," said the
blacksmith.

Gubblum removed his pipe and muttered sententiously:

"It's die-spensy, I tell thee."

"Dandering and wandering about at all hours of the day and night,"
continued the blacksmith.

"It's all die-spensy," repeated the peddler.

"And as widderful and wizzent as a polecat nailed up on a barn door,"
said Tom o' Dint, lifting his grating knife from the grindstone and
speaking with a voice as hoarse.

"Eh, and as weak as watter with it," added the blacksmith.

"His as was as strong as rum punch," rejoined the fiddler.

"It's die-spensy, John--nowt else," said Gubblum.

The miller broke in testily.

"What's die-spensy?"

"What ails Paul Ritson?" answered Gubblum.

"Shaf on your balderdash," said Dick of the Syke; "die-spensying and
die-spensying. You've no' but your die-spensy for everything. Tommy's
rusty throat, and John's big toe, and lang Geordie's