“To be sure I am. Don’t say any more about it. Tell me about your garden.”
“Well: I am trying what I can make of it, after I have done working with father. But it takes a long time to bring it round.”
“What! is the wet there, too?”
“Lord, yes! The wet was beyond everything at first. I could not leave the spade in the ground ten minutes, if father called me, but the water was standing in the hole when I went back again. It is not so bad now, since I made a drain to join upon father’s principal one; and father gave me some sand, and plenty of manure; but it seems to us that manure does little good. It won’t sink in when the ground is so wet.”
“Well, there will be the summer next, and that will dry up your garden.”
“Yes. People say the smells are dreadful in hot weather, though. But we seem to get used to that. I thought it sickly work, just after we came, going down to get osiers, and digging near the big ditch that is our plague now: but somehow, it does not strike me now as it did then, though Fleming says it is getting worse every warm day. But come—I must be off. What will you help yourself to? And don’t forget your parcel.”
Becky’s great anxiety was to know when her brothers would come again. O! very often, she was assured—oftener and oftener as the vegetables came forward; whenever there were either too many or too few to send to the town by rail.
After Becky had jumped down, the farmer and one of the men were seen to be contemplating the pony.
“What have you been giving your pony lately?” asked the farmer of Allan. “I ask as a friend, having some experience of this part of the country. Have you been letting him graze?”
“Yes, in the bit of meadow that we have leave for. There is a good deal of grass there, now. He has been grazing there these three weeks.”