she adds, with a tender little note in her voice. A pretty picture it all makes—the brilliant blue and snows beyond, the golden gorse beside, the green grass before, and in the midst this homely, elderly woman, patiently kneeling to mother her family of frisking orphans.
The lambs fed, we are taken to admire the ultra-precious chicks, the new yard or so of fencing, Shot’s fresh kennel, made out of a beer-barrel (“Don’t I wish every beer-barrel had got a dog in it!” cries Catherine, that ardent Prohibitionist), and, finally, a happy family of yellow single daffodils, laughing and nodding at the reflection of their own sunny faces in the race. “They’re very late this year, we’d moved the bulbs; but I think that only makes their coming all the pleasanter,” says Peter’s wife. She stoops, to lift up and smile down upon one of the golden heads, and the spring sunbeams lie like a blessing on her own grey one.
“But aren’t you lonely, Mrs. Ross, here all day by yourself?”
“Oh, no, never!” she responds, with ever so bright a look. “I’m far too busy ever to be lonely. And then, there’s the lammies, and the chicken, let alone Shot and Peggy, you know, for company; and Peter’s mostly in to his meals, and always done by dusk. But I know what you mean, too. We don’t have so very many neighbours, and we always live retired—once a fortnight, coming out of church, is mostly my only chance to see folks. Sue Simpson, now, at Home—or Martha Pope . . . no, I don’t know a single one of my old friends, perhaps, as could have stood it; but I’m perfectly happy! Maybe I mightn’t have been, that’s true, had I
