Teresa fell into a doze and had an uncomfortable dream. All the people she disliked came and made faces at her, people she had forgotten ages ago and who in all decency should have forgotten her. They flickered out of the mists, distorted but recognizable, clutched at her with hooked fingers, pressed closer and closer, leering malevolently. Teresa was dismayed. Not a friend anywhere! She lolled forward, moaning, “John! Oh, Jan!” Jiggy Dan’s elbow hit her cheek and she woke up to an otherwise empty kitchen filled with the reek of burnt pilchard oil, a dead hearth, and cold night air pouring in through the open door. She shuddered, rubbed her sleepy lids and staggered, yawning, to bed.
Jiggy Dan, propped up in the corner, fiddled on, eyes sealed, mind oblivious, arm sawing mechanically.
They found him in the morning on the yard muck heap, Martha’s petticoat over his head, fiddle clasped to his bosom, back to back with a snoring sow.
The Christmas festivities terminated on Twelfth Night with the visit of goose dancers from Monks Cove, the central figure of whom was a lad wearing the hide and horns of a bullock attended by other boys dressed in female attire. Horse-play and crude buffoonery was the feature rather than dancing, and Teresa got some more of her crockery smashed.
Next morning Eli went to Helston for his last term and Ortho took off his coat.
When Eli came home at midsummer he could hardly credit his eyes. Ortho had performed miracles. Very wisely he had not attempted to fight back the moor everywhere, but had concentrated, and the fields he had put in crop were done thoroughly, deep-plowed, well manured and evenly sown—Penaluna could not make a better show.
The brothers walked over the land on the evening of Eli’s return; everywhere the young crops stood up thick and healthy, pushing forwards to fruition. Ortho glowed with justifiable pride, talked farming eagerly. He and Ned had given the old place a hammering, he said. By the Holy they had! Mended the buildings, whitewashed the orchard trees, grubbed, plowed, packed ore-weed and sea-sand, harrowed and hoed from dawn-blink to star-wink, day in, day out—Sundays included. But they’d get it all back—oh, aye, and a hundredfold.
Eli had been in the right; agriculture was the thing—the good old soil! You put in a handful and picked up a bushel in a few months. Cattle—pah! One cow produced but one calf per annum and that was not marketable for three or four years. No—wheat, barley and oats forever!
Now Eli was home they could hold all they’d got and reclaim a field or so a year. In next to no time they’d have the whole place waving yellow from bound to bound. Ortho even had designs on the original moor, saw no reason why they should not do their own milling in time—they had ample water power. He glowed with enthusiasm. Eli’s cautious mind discounted much of these grandiose schemes, but his heart went out to Ortho; the mellowing fields before him had not been lightly won.