Oh, didn’t I though.
“Well, never mind about Ephraim now,” I said. “Tell me about yourself.” We’d walked slowly on, side by side, away from Burnplatts, and had come to a small plantation of wind-battered trees that sheltered us from view, and we sat upon a granite boulder that bulged through the turf. “Tell me about yourself, Miriam—how do you pass your time, what do you do?”
“Oh! I can find enough to do. I knit. I’m a famous knitter. Granddam taught me that, and she sells the things I knit at the farmhouses round; and I make mops and brooms—they say mine are the cleverest fingers in all Burnplatts; and then, when I can buy a book, I read.”
“Read!” I could not help exclaiming, for though it has been said that reading and writing come by Nature, well I knew that Nature’s travails need a midwife if reading and writing are to be the issues.
“Aye, those were happy days when I learned to read and write. I was only a wee child then, and old Daddy was alive and dwelt with us at Burnplatts.”
“Old Daddy! You’re rich in relations‚” I broke in jealously.
She laughed merrily. “Daddy was no relation. ’Tis but the name we all called him by. He used to live at Burnplatts, but he’s been dead these many years. I don’t know how he came to be there, a poor, harmless, shiftless, old man he was. They all made game of him, and he was at everyone’s beck and nod. But they didn’t grudge him meat and drink when they found he could learn me to read and write, and sums, too,” she added triumphantly. “I’ve read the ‘Pilgrim’s Progress’ twenty times, and twenty times to that, and when you tore me from that horrid man at the Wakes I likened you to Greatheart in the story.”
I believe I blushed. “I’d have fared badly but for Jim,” I told her.
“Oh! Jim,” she said disparagingly, with that utter lack of justice in the award of praise and blame which riper years have taught me to look for her in her sex.
Well now, how long we sat there I don’t know: it seemed but a few minutes. But suddenly she sprang up in consternation. “I must be going; they’ll be searching for me.”