The post-girl

THE POST-GIRL
EDWARD C. BOOTH
New York GROSSET & DUNLAP Publishers
Copyright, 1908, by THE CENTURY Co.
Published, June, 1908
THE POST-GIRL
CHAPTER I
When summer comes Mrs. Gatheredge talks of repapering her parlor, and Ginger gets him ready to sleep in the scullery at a night's notice, but the letting of lodgings is not a staple industry in this quarter of Yorkshire, and folks would fare ill on it who knew nothing of the art of keeping a pig or growing their own potatoes in the bit of garden at the back.
Visitors pass through, indeed, in large enough numbers between seed- and harvest-time (mostly by bicycle), staring their way round the village from house to house. But all that ever develops is an occasional request for a cup of water—in the hope, no doubt, that we may give them milk—or an interrogation as to the road to somewhere else. Steg's reply to the latter, through a long succession of summers, has waxed into a set formula, which he prepares with all the exactness of a prescription:
These are mere migratory birds of visit, however—here this morning and gone by noon—leaving little trace of their passage beyond a footmark on somebody's doorstep or a mustard-stained sandwich-paper blowing drearily against the tombstones in the churchyard. Residential visitors are almost unknown to Ullbrig. One or two petty tradesmen bring their wives and families from Hunmouth for cheap sojourn during the summer months, but they are more residential than visitors, recurring each year with the regularity of harvest, and blending as imperceptibly with Ullbrig life as the water with Jevons' milk. They have become to all intents and purposes a part of us, and are never spoken of as visitors —they are merely said to be wi' us again or just coom back. The class of visitor which is lacking to Ullbrig is the pleasure-seeking variety which comes for a month, is charged unprotesting for lights and fire, never lends a hand to the washing of its own pots, and pays town price for country butter. Our local designation for such guests—when we get them—is spawers.