Turning aside to the right while she thus spoke, Lily descended a gradual slope to the margin of the stream, on which they found an old man dozily reclined in his ferry-boat.
As, seated side by side, they were slowly borne over the still waters under a sunless sky, Kenelm would have renewed the subject which his companion had begun, but she shook her head, with a significant glance at the ferryman. Evidently what she had to say was too confidential to admit of a listener, not that the old ferryman seemed likely to take the trouble of listening to any talk that was not addressed to him. Lily soon did address her talk to him, “So, Brown, the cow has quite recovered.”
“Yes, Miss, thanks to you, and God bless you. To think of your beating the old witch like that!”
“‘Tis not I who beat the witch, Brown; ‘tis the fairy. Fairies, you know, are much more powerful than witches.”
“So I find, Miss.”
Lily here turned to Kenelm; “Mr. Brown has a very nice milch-cow that was suddenly taken very ill, and both he and his wife were convinced that the cow was bewitched.”
“Of course it were, that stands to reason. Did not Mother Wright tell my old woman that she would repent of selling milk, and abuse her dreadful; and was not the cow taken with shivers that very night?”
“Gently, Brown. Mother Wright did not say that your wife would repent of selling milk, but of putting water into it.”
“And how did she know that, if she was not a witch? We have the best of customers among the gentlefolks, and never any one that complained.”
“And,” answered Lily to Kenelm, unheeding this last observation, which was made in a sullen manner, “Brown had a horrid notion of enticing Mother Wright into his ferry-boat and throwing her into the water, in order to break the spell upon the cow. But I consulted the fairies, and gave him a fairy charm to tie round the cow’s neck. And the cow is quite well now, you see. So, Brown, there was no necessity to throw Mother Wright into the water, because she said you put some of it into the milk. But,” she added, as the boat now touched the opposite bank, “shall I tell you, Brown, what the fairies said to me this morning?”