The dream of fair women

Front matter

V l

Book_

Copyright N°_

Part I: The Weaver And The Flax Chapter Page

I. At the Nightcrow Inn. 3

II. Rats’ Castle.15

III. The Ruddle Vixen.33

IV. Silken Threads.42

V. Debate at the Nightcrow.55

VI. Flaxen Threads.63

VII. The Solitary Poppy.71

VIII. Spell by the Water.82

IX. Dog Days.98

X. Whitest Witchery.109

XI. Midsummer Night’s Dream.124

XII. At the Nightcrow Inn Again .... 130

XIII. To Fiddlestone.144

PART II: THE SCARLET THREAD II. 19 July, 1919 ( Continued ).168

III. 19 July, 1919 ( Continued ).194

IV. 19 July, 1919 ( Continued ) .203

ix

X CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAGE

V. 19 July, 1919 ( Continued ) .208

VI. Guest in the House.238

VII. A 1919 Theatrical Entertainment, and the

Departure of Julian Warbeck .... 288

VIII. Eveline and Mary.304

IX. A Little Dinner Party.323

X. Heavier Burden.328

XI. Departure of Major D’Arcy Fairfax . . 346

XII. The Pathetic Knight.363

Part Iii: The Broken Web

I. Dream Tryst.375

II. Departure of Captain Collyer .... 384

III. Dolor Decresit.391

IV. The Visit to Rookhurst.403

V. Before Noon.422

VI. A Document in Hysteria.431

VII. The Departure of Peter White .... 440

VIII. After Noon.443

IX. Vesperale.456

Valediction ..462

Part I The Weaver And The Flax

. . . who sighs

Amid this starless waste of woe f To find a pathway . . .

THE

DREAM OF FAIR WOMEN

Chapter I

One Friday evening towards the end of May, in the year 1919, a one-eyed labourer known as Brownie in the North Devon hamlet of Brakspears St. Flammea was sitting before a tankard of ale, with his elbows on the long oak table of the Nightcrow Inn. He was a thin man, in a worn black coat splashed with mortar and without a collar, wearing a decayed hat with the brim turned down and pulled so low over his eye that the black moustache seemed to be growing from a circle of gloom. For half-an-hour he had been talking about a lady he had met that evening, and telling his companions what she had said about a young gentle¬ man living alone in a cottage near the hamlet.

Other men were seated on wooden benches round the polished oak table, relaxing after the day’s work in the fields. Talk had stopped while the landlord lit the paraffin lamp and hung it on the bent nail beside the wall clock. The low flame misted the glass, but slowly and evenly the blur rolled down the globe, leav¬ ing it clear and bright. A man called Tom Fitchey asked for another quart by rattling the pewter pot on the table. It was pay-day, and many shillings were in his pocket. The landlord came back from the barrel room with the ale, and placing it before Tom, took the shilling with a word of thanks, and turned up the wick of the lamp.

“Have a drink, Tagur, midear, : ” said Brownie in a voice hoarse as a crow’s, but with the low crooning tone of a wood pigeon’s notes. The man addressed as Tiger was sitting beside him.

At the invitation of his friend he drank a draught of ale. Earlier in the evening the two had been down the cliff-paths on the north side of the headland, col¬ lecting the eggs of herring gulls.

“Her were a bootiful maid, her were,” said Brownie, reflectively, “and I could have sworn her were a vixen, asleep in the zin.”

Some time later, when the Nightcrow Inn was filled with men and dogs, the young gentleman mentioned so frequently by Brownie opened the door and stepped from starlit darkness into an atmosphere of growling talk, spitting, rank tobacco smoke, and banged pewter pots, through which glowered the orange-sooty flame of the paraffin lamp. He entered so quietly that Muggy the hamlet wit, sitting in his usual comer-seat under the wall-clock, did not notice that the subject of his story was in the bar. Muggy raised his voice almost to a shout, so that all might hear the joke.

“That’s as true as I’m sitting here. The young lady says to me, when I says to her that the gennulmun were living by himself in Rats’ Castle, ‘Well, Muggy/ her says, ‘what be the gennulmun’s name—Lorcl Tornsox?’ ”

“Ho, ho, ho!” laughed Brownie, “Mis’r Meddlesome be a praper Lord Tomsox—worse nor I be.”

The young man at the door hesitated, then said gaily, “Evening, Brownie!”

“Gorbrugge!” gasped Brownie, “if Mis’r Meddlesome bant hereabouts!”

A chorus of Evenun, zur\ came through the tobacco mist. The landlord standing near touched with his pipe stem what looked like an enormous shiny horsechestnut above his eyes, for his bald head was a sun¬ burnt brown.

“I beg your pardon, Mr. Maddison, zur,” cried old Muggy from his corner; “no offence intended, zur. I beg your pardon, Mr. Maddison.”

Old Muggy had been round the world; no man in the parish was more polite.

“I was just repeating, sir, what a lady visitor to Croyde zaid to me this morning when I took the lady a telegram. Her wanted to know, zur, where you lived, and I told her Rats’ Castle!”

Shouts of laughter bestirred the air. Silence was instant, for Muggy had held up his hand. From the corner his face, shiny like an old apple, smiled beyond the smoke. He wore an old tweed fishing cap, a black shirt, a crumpled collar and a frayed tartan tie knotted as though it was a bootlace.

“ ‘And what be his occupation, Muggy ?’ her zays. ‘Looking after sick birds and beasts of the fields, miss, I zays, ‘and also study-ing of many books.’ ”

“ ‘A pity he hasn’t studied his face in the glass, Muggy!’ her says; beggin’ your pardon, Mr. Maddi-

“Ho, ho, ho!” bellowed Brownie, full of ale, “dang me if her haven’t got sharp eyes, Mis’r Meddlesome, even if you haven’t got a sharp razor, midear!”

The Nightcrow Inn was filled with the loudest laugh¬ ter. In the space of the door leading to the barrel room appeared the three faces of the landlord’s wife and daughters. About the tenant of Rats’ Castle they were most curious. He stood with his back to the door, tall and smiling. He had brown hair and a beard of lighter hue, and was dressed only in a faded khaki shirt, flannel trousers tom by thorns and brambles, and old shoes. Clasped in his right hand was a staff of hazel, with a fork at its top end.

“What be you drinking, zur?” asked the landlord of the Nightcrow Inn.

“A quart of ale, please.”

“Thank ee, zur, you’m welcome,” floated the answer as the short plump man went through the low door¬ way to the barrel room.

“Mis’r Meddlesome, I hope you aren’t o-ffended, zur?” said Brownie in his hoarse, soft, croodling voice.

His single eye, very gentle, regarded him with mournful affection. The answer of the young man was to toss over his tobacco pouch, with a reassuring “Of course not, Brownie.”

Brownie finished his third quart, banged the pot, and standing crookedly between bench and table raised his arm and began to sing—a thing he did when he had swallowed three quarts.

“ Ruddle-coloured din ,

Be the best colour under th ’ zin ”

he croaked.

Many faces turned to look at the young gennulmun.

who wondered why they were looking so knowingly at him.

“You see, zur,” cried Muggy from his corner, “our parents had a zaying that 'Mousey-colour din, or hair, be the best colour under the zin, or sun,’ and Brownie have altered the colour of the hair in the saying, do you see, sir?”

Again they laughed, and he looked puzzled. Brownie leaned anxiously over the table, beckoned mysteriously with a broken-nailed finger, and stared earnestly at him. He went near him.

“Mis’r Meddlesome,” his whisper was almost a shout, breathed warmly into his listener’s ear, “Mis’r Meddle¬ some, zur, don’t ee be o-ffended at what I be going to tell ee, will ee, now?”

The young man shook his head, and the black mous¬ tache tickled his ear. An argument about the slack¬ ness of the Parish Council in repairing roads had been started by two yeomen farmers, and many loud voices were speaking at once.

“Now, midear, listen on what Brownie be a-going to tell ee. It be something peculiar. Do ee know Corpsnout? ’Twas there I saw her. Ruddle vixen. Ho-ho-ho-ho-ho! ”

Brownie had fallen back upon the bench, tilted his head, and given forth a noise. His mouth opened wide and he chuckled to himself at nearly the top of his voice. He stopped, stared earnestly, beckoned once more, craned over and croaked, “Her spoke to me confirmationally when I told her I knowed ee fairish well —begging your pardon, zur.”

“Your ale,” said the landlord of the Nightcrow Inn, behind him. He took the swilling pewter pot, shouted, “Good health” to him, and drank deeply.

“Mis’r Meddlesome, zur,” beckoned Brownie, who had been regarding dismally the tilting of the mug, “Ee weren’t o-ffended at what I did tell ee, were ee now?”

“I am very interested, Brownie.”

Brownie made a cawing whisper through his hands. “Now, I saw the ruddle vixen on Corpsnout northside this evening with Tagur, and her said to me confirmationally her wanted to meet ee, midear!”

Brownie sat down, and tried many times to wink his glass eye at William, then seeing that the gennulmun was not heeding him, he began to sing. William was lost in a reverie, the noise and movement faded out, like green fields when a cloud covers the sun. He had forgotten Brownie and his information; it had made no impression on his mind. The look on his face in repose was familiar to many of the drinkers in the Nightcrow Inn. He seemed to be excited by his thoughts. His eyes became animated, as he stared unseeing past the wall-clock. He came only once a week to the village to buy the simplest and cheapest foods; why he chose to live in a dilapidated cottage so far from the ways of men, whether he had parents or wife, no one in the hamlet knew. Many had seen him by day on the hills, usually lying on his back with his face to the sky. He avoided most men, but whenever he met them he was courteous and had a cheery word for them, by which invariable behavior they declared him to be a “praper gennulmun,” al¬ though he was friendless and obviously poor.

The dominant traits in his mind being increased by drink, Brownie’s altruistic desires began to assert them¬ selves, and unasked he was bestowing upon the assembled company the generosity of a song. He beat a funereal time with his empty tankard.

“Zeagull, zeagull,

Vly away over th* foam,

And tell-on my daddy Ah’m waiting to hear When, 0 when, he he a-cumin' home!

Zeagull, zeagull,

What's that Ah hear you t y say f That stame-ship he foundered And all hands he droon-ded —

O zeagull! O-O-O-O!

And the sloghorn of the stame-ship was blowin’ for two months in Combe Martin Bay—Yaas!”

The chanty ended in Brownie shouting. The listen¬ ers roared with laughter, and some of the younger men, who had served in the Army, cheered and cried for more. Brownie's pronunciation of the words steamship and foghorn always caused merriment. The singer swayed backwards and forwards on his legs and looked solemnly at them, his moustache like the wings of a swift inverted, then banged his tankard on the table and stretching across to the gennulmun, bawled, “Yaas! Ruddle vixen, Mis’r Missom, d’ee hear? Her said her were a-wondering who ee were, her did! Nice li’l maid for ee! You’m a-right, midear, proper li’l maid her be. Her hair be bootiful and red, like a ruddle pool in th' roadway after rain. I thought as how her were a vixen at first, lying in th’ gorse! Just right for to make ee happy, midear. Give ee twenty babies, midear, like my missus gave me. Yaas!”

Brownie guffawed and banged the quart mug; the landlord cried, “Not so much noise, chaps, please!” and came forward to William.

“Beggin your pardon, zur,” he whispered, “but have you zeen anthing lately of Jack o’ Rags?”

“I saw him this afternoon. He’s moving out of the mine into the shed, I believe, now that it is warmer Two days ago he left some gulls’ eggs on my door¬ step. He often leaves rabbits, and bundles of drift¬ wood. I believe he thinks I’m some sort of a god to be propitiated by offerings!”

The landlord nodded as though he quite compre¬ hended.

“Of course, it may be unusual, zur, but I can quite understand. For I reads a bit myself. Oh, yes, I’m a master reader. All of the best and most interesting Sunday papers I reads—the News of the World, Lloyds, and The People* I reckon I could be a writer misself, I’ve learn’t so much by studying them papers, only I haven’t the eddication or the jennus.”

“But genius, or even education, I should imagine, might handicap you for work on those papers. It would be such a hindrance! ” suggested the other, smil¬ ing. The landlord looked scared as though by the diffi¬ cult and dark ways into which the conversation was taking him, but he made a valiant attempt to follow, with the result that the talk was somewhat laboured and disconnected.

“That’s what I be telling my missus, Mister Madd’- zun, I zays, may be peculiar, with his beard—beggin’ your pardon, zur.”

“Oh, quite!”

* These papers, so popular with the semi-educated people, do their best to rival one another in display of accounts of murders, divorces, crimes, etc. Naturally they have the largest sales in town and country alike.—H. W.

u

“He may be peculiar, I says, with his beard, and his animals and living in Rats’ Castle all alone, but I reckons there be something to it! 'Him so good look¬ ing/ her replies, 'what for do he wear a beard? No young lady would look at un!’ 'P’raps he doan’t like young ladies/ I says, 'but animals instead/ 'It isn’t natural, Albert/ she says, 'for a young gennulmun not to like young maids. He looks that melancholy at times, what comes of being too much by himself!’ What be that Broonie was telling you on?” The land¬ lord of the Nightcrow Inn spoke in a low and confiden¬ tial voice, and changed the conversation with relief and with a suggestion of apology in its tone, as though timorous of a rebuff.

“He was speaking about a ruddle vixen that he saw upon the headland. It turned out to be a girl. I haven’t yet quite understood his remarks.”

“Well, zur, it be after this way. Broonie has been full of it all the evening. Broonie and Tiger went on the headland after seabird’s eggs. The two were going to the rocks below down the slope, when Broonie stopped and pointed to a ruddle patch in the furze bushes-”

“Yaas!” broke in the voice of the sitting spectator, “I stoppit an pointed: 'Looksee/ I says, 'Looksee, now, Tagur, midear, did ee ever see before vixen slaeping in th’ sun?’ That’s as true as I’m a God-fearing man, Mis’r Meddlesome. 'Wish I’d a gun/ zays Tiger, when up looks the vixen and zays, plain as a straw¬ berry, '0, do ee?’ her says, lofty as you please. A most bootiful young lady her were. Us got into converzation wi her. Her weren’t proud, not likely! 'And where be th’ young gennulmun with a beard?’ her asks me, confirmationally. 'And he had some bootiful spannuls. Tell him I would like a pup from him/ her says. Ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho.”

Brownie rolled sideways in merriment.

Two more labourers entered, acknowledging respect¬ fully the gennulmun’s greeting. The landlord came back, balancing the three quart pots, and shouting for his daughter to lend a hand. A strapping girl with a long yellow plait tossed over her shoulder came in answer to his call, and thenceforward till closing time she was refilling mugs and winding up the tin-horned gramophone behind the bar in response to shouts of “another chewne, midear.” Muggy, the recognised wag of the hamlet of Brakspears St. Flammea, began to recount a joke about Gladstone at the top of his voice, while The Tiger and the other whist players under the lamp continued with their card-playing and bel¬ lowed criticism of their partners’ mistakes. Several men began playing rings for quarts; Brownie was snoring under his hat, while his ancient lurcher dog snored by the pipe-stove. The hands of the wall-clock crept nearer to the hour of departure, and again he heard the smoothly thick tones of the landlord beside him.

“Beggin’ your pardon, zur, but th’ young lady be living at Cryde Bay, across the Corpsnout Headland, ye know. Hers a married lady called Mrs. Fairfax.”

The young man drank some more ale. The vigour of the home brew was warming, and he made a resolu¬ tion to visit the Night crow several times a week instead of once. He would be able to dispel loneliness by coming here—but he would not, however; for social habits, even those of the remotest seaboard, were not for him. Nothing must interfere with his soaring thought: not even a weak craving for the company of simple, sincere men. The warmth of the ale com¬ municated itself to his head, and he brought from his pocket a soiled book and glanced at the open page. The smoke, the heat, the noise, all these floated away; until with almost the effect of a physical blow the landlord's voice obtruded:

“ ... So there be some talk o' watchers going

forth at night. Two more ewes were worritted last night over Brakspear Down. Muggy here, he reckons there be a dog worritting th' shaep. You've seen noth¬ ing of a slinketty mongrel, have ee now zur?"

“I were only wondering,” informed the landlord, “because you'm about walking a good lot. Funny thing, now, old Voley th’ shepherd do zay that he has found some sort of tracks, only the ground be too hard to take a likeness. Something must be done, reckons. There be nigh on a zgore of lambs and ewes worritted this season! All their heads be tom tarrible!”

“Perhaps it is the work of several dogs. Sheep worrying is a stealthy business, you know. Cases are on record, I believe, where actually sheep dogs have slunk away at night and tom lambs, returning in dark¬ ness. Traps have been set by the shepherds, but the dogs by day have observed their location and so avoided them.”

The landlord looked frightened. “Zome so zay it be a ghostie, zur. Do ee credit ghosties, now? A mor¬ tal number of men were hanged in this district less than a hundred years agone. Muggy, now, he do say that their ghosties be back in revenge!”

“It be gone ten, feyther,” interrupted his daughter.

“Drink up, chaps!” cried the landlord, in fear of the

H

constable who every evening was known to be stand¬ ing outside in the lane. “Come on, boys. Ten o’clock.”

Hilariously yet swiftly they got on their legs and clumped to the door. Brownie and his dog heaved past the gennulmun, Brownie crying “Gude-night midear, gude-night,” his old lurcher coming to lick his hand. One by one they crowded to the doorway, while carry¬ ing on their growling arguments. He followed the last labourer, bidding good-night to the landlord and thanking him for the gift of two dead mice, then passed into the shuffling crowd outside.

The lane led westwards to Falcon Goyal and the sea. As he went gaily in the keen air he felt an exultation at the thought of his free life. He joyed in the night beauty. Like a gold curlew’s bill, the new moon curved in a violet sky, the simmering roar of the tide grew suddenly, and the goyal was before him. He quitted the cart track and followed a path through gorse and rising brake fern to the cove below. His way was lit by a globe of silver, Venus reluming the pale evening vapours over the sea. By his side the goyal stream murmured round the stones and its bubbles chimed in the little pools, melodic with the lone rattle of an evejar and the booming of dor-beetles. Rabbits fled from quiet nibbling at his swift descent, and some¬ where a roosting bird twitted a drowsy alarm.

Chapter II

He stood for awhile near his cottage, tranced with a reverie of the stars shining faintly in the waterpools of the rill, and the wind among the blackthorns. This earth beauty was but a medium by which he might reach the realm of dream. He sighed as he took one last look at the surge white and gleaming in the cove, and opened the door. Three floppy warm things awakened from sleep nosed joyfully their god's ankles, and Grannie Gordangle, an ancient daw perched upon the back of a chair, croaked softly.

“Down, Tim Tatters! Down, Billjohn! Down, Hereward!" he ordered the puppies, and lit a candle. The room was small, without carpet or mat; there was a wooden table, a broken armchair, and a soap¬ box. By the solitary illumination he perceived Becky and Pie the kittens on the bookshelf, and Isaak the otter cub curled up in a corner with the milk bottle still held between its paws. He could not see Diogenes the carrion crow but discovered Oswald the broken¬ winged seagull in the rusty oven. Diogenes the carrion crow was probably upstairs with his cousins Jerry the jay, and Moony Matthew the owlet. It was necessary to remove Becky and Pie from their retreat on the bookshelf, since he wished to read before going to bed. The volumes had once been tidily arranged on the 15 shelf, but after the custom of books they soon leant on one another, incapable of self-support. There were the volumes of Richard Jeffries— The Amateur Poacher, Bevis, Field and Hedgerow, Amaryllis at the Fair, The Pageant of Summer, and The Dewy Mom; there were books by Thomas Hardy and Joseph Conrad, and John Masefield’s Gallipoli; beside these there were the poets, Thompson, Keats, Blake, Shelley, and a living poet named de la Mare, whose verses he had come upon in a shell hole—sodden, yellow, and rat-gnawn, but how the thoughts of a brother-man had consoled him!

Now he took a volume of Blake, and three lines he read, sufficient for a foothold from which his mind might spring into space where was neither sound nor form nor colour, where like a White Bird in a shining void it spread its wings and was free. In the vivid light he saw quicker than conscious thought how little and false were the main ideals of mankind. He saw the earth as something small and swung in space, some¬ thing which was there for a while only. He saw man¬ kind a smudge on the surface of the earth, a smudge which had strayed from the control of the impulse which swung from the shining void but which was striving desperately to control it once again. This vision, which came to him in an instant of time, caused a look of intense and eager excitement in his eyes. It passed, and under its influence he paced the room, speaking to an invisible listener.

“Once there were crowds of cheering men m London and New York, in Paris, in Rome, and in Vienna; and following the cheering was joylessness of nations subdued and earnest, all praying to the same God, all believing in their national righteousness; and in spite of the praying men continued to die and to be maimed—both were reliefs from the desolation and the despair of war. In that war my puny body suffered and sweated and was tempted to destroy itself, but something extra in my spirit, in common with a million others, made me keep on, though I was ill-made to bear with fortitude physical pain and bodily stress.”

He was an unremarkable figure, with his high shoul¬ ders on which was set a thin neck supporting a small head covered with hair tangled and unkempt. The front teeth of his upper jaw, while not projecting, com¬ pletely covered the front teeth of the lower jaw, and the mouth was wide. A commonplace face, in repose, that would not be looked at twice, unless one saw the eyes, a singular and beautiful feature. As he turned away from the book they caught and h.eld the rambling light of the candle, and smouldered in the gloom of the kitchen. They werelipbrimming with a deep warm brown, mysterious, translucent, and tender.

“0 Great Spirit of Earth,” he cried in agitation. “No man wanted to die, yet the bones of the slain girdle the earth, and the footsteps of women follow in pride and grief and prayer to the wilderness where they lie. And so men struggled in ancient Greece and Babylon, in Assyria and Egypt—in all the civilizations that have been. The sand hides the skulls of their priests, and hawks nest in the walls of the temples not yet fallen. Their Gods are dead, and today all nations pray to a God; yet these things remain. Yet I should fight again if our nation were threatened; and so would some other young man like me by the Mediterranean, by the Pacific, by the Rhine. But in my soul I know it to be wrong, for I have floated in the shining void of the Great Earth Spirit. I will destroy the false ideals of mankind, the false deity, and when I am stronger I will make all men hear my voice!”

He went to the cobwebbed window to watch the sinking of the moon with the evestar into the western ocean.

“It is awfully lonely,” he sighed, another mood pass¬ ing over him, “but I cannot turn aside from the way I must walk. I must wait till I get power to express my vision. How many more years in Rats’ Castle? Will my army gratuity last? My food only costs about seven shillings a week—I must be more economical, and buy no more meat—I shall have to eat rabbits, hedgehogs, and fish only. Do you think I am mad, or that I have delusions? No, I am just an ordinary chap with a mind that is keener than most. People will not heed the delusionists nowadays. 0 Here ward, my dear, what a weird little yowl! No, I won’t have the three of you clawing my trousers. Down, little puppy dogs, down! Now, don’t he on your backs as though I were a bullying swine. And don’t lick my face, please, I’m not a plate. Lie on your proper bed—that pair of trousers over there. Billjohn, my dear, faithful old Billjohn—heavens, I’m getting sloppy and sentimental over this three-months-old pup. Faithful old Bill¬ john, indeed!”

Habitually he talked to his birds and animals, as if they understood what he said. He sat at the open door beside the puppies, on the cold stone floor, and taking a book out of his pocket opened it at a remembered page, read a thought that inspired him whenever he felt acutely sad and lonely.

How willingly I would strew the paths oj all with flowers; how beautiful a delight to make the world joy oils! The song should never be silent, the dance never still, the laugh should sound like water which runs for ever .

“How beautiful a delight to make the world joyous!” he repeated in a rapture, staring at a star burning above the high valleyside. A wave crashed on the dark beach, another boomed in the seal cavern at the cove’s mouth. He stood up and leaned against the doorpost, staring into the darkness for several minutes. When he closed the door behind him he felt tired.

Tim Tatters, Billjohn and Here ward were lying in the comer upon the cast pair of trousers. He knelt down to wish them good-night, and they rolled over on their backs and struck bashfully at the god’s face with their paws, at the same time trying to wet his nose with their tongues. He patted them, but as this produced signs of canine giggling he bade them gruffly to lie down; the gruffness caused them to beat an agonized tattoo with their tails upon the old trousers, so that a little cloud of dust arose and made the god sneeze: and they sprang up and in an ecstacy licked his ears.

Becky and Pie, the kittens, were purring upon the only armchair in the room, an affair with three and a half legs and most of its spiral springs burst from an underneath that shed each time one sat on it a flutter¬ ing of horse-hairs, feathers, dead moths and micegnawn fragments of newspapers. His arrival at Brakspears St. Flammea in a tottery jingle three months previously had coincided with the end of a village auction, and this armchair was the only article that remained unsold. Indeed, the only offer elicited by the hyperboles of the auctioneer had been a bid of one shilling sixpence three-farthings: he sold the thing by private treaty for half-a-guinea to William, who in the kindness of his heart had paid a stumbling Brownie five shillings to carry it with his bag down to the cottage. Several times he had thought of throwing it into the sea, but he knew he would not be able to buy another. However, it was useful as a bed for the kittens and as a musical treat for the puppies who constantly worried the disembowelled springs and so created a not unpleasant harmony.

Pie was a black-and-white kitten, very tiny and gentle, with narrow ears upstanding like black and withered mistletoe leaves. He had been born in a hollow tree, and was still half wild. Brownie's wife had given it to him to keep away rats and mice. As Pie's size after six months of life was between that of a mole and a stoat, it was perhaps understandable that nothing larger than a wood-louse had been captured. Becky was a yellow-and-plum coloured female kitten, very affectionate and unselfish, who spent half her life in nursing the harumscarum Pie and washing its fur. Pie, he often thought, was Beck's dolly, satisfying her immature maternal cravings. When, however, the dolly refused her tender offices with spits and splutters she would endeavour to nurse the puppies. These humourists rolled her over and over and pranced around her, begging her to run away and be chased. Resenting this, Becky came sorrowfully to her amused master and craved sympathy in the form of goat's milk.