The first hour of the day, the bright first hour of a spring day I mean, appears always to me as if care and thought had nought to do with it. It seems made for those light and whirling visions--not unmingled with thanks and praise--which drive past the dreamy imagination like motes in the sunshine, partaking still, in a degree, of sleep, and having all its soft indistinctness, without losing the brightness of waking perception: thoughts, hopes, and fancies, that glitter as they go, succeeded each minute by clearer and more brilliant things, till the whole, at length, form themselves into the sterner realities of noonday life.
The two men wandered on in that dreamy hour. They listened to the sweet birds singing in the trees; and it was a time of year when the whole world was tuneful; they stopped by the side of the babbling brook, and gazed into its dancing waters; they watched the swift fish darting along the stream, and hallooed to a heron which had just caught one of the finny tribe in its bill.
"Now had we a hawk," said the peasant, "we would very soon have Master Greycoat there, as surely as foul Richard de Ashby will catch pretty Kate Greenly before he has done."
"Think you so?" said the lord's man, certainly not speaking of catching the heron. "Will she be so easily deceived, think you?"
"Ay, will she," answered the peasant. "Not that the girl wants sense or learning either, for the good priest took mighty pains with her, and she can read and write as well as any clerk in the land. Nor has she a bad heart either, though it is somewhat fierce and quick withal--like her mother's, who one day broke Tim Clough's head with a tankard, when he was somewhat boisterous to her, and then well-nigh died with grief when she found she had really cracked his skull. But this girl is as vain as a titmouse, and though I do believe she loves young Harland, the franklin's son, at the bottom, yet I have often told him that it is as great a chance she never marries him as that the river will be frozen next winter; and now I see this fellow come down again and hanging about her as he did before, I say her vanity will take her by the ears, and lead her to any market he chooses to carry her to."
"Alack and a-well-a-day!" said the lord's man, "that a gentleman like that cannot let a far off place such as this be in peace, with its quiet sunshine and good country-folks. He may find a light-o'-love easily enough in the great cities, without coming down to break a father's heart, and make a good youth miserable, and turn a gay-hearted country girl into a sorrowful harlot! I hope he may get his head broke for his pains!"
"He is like to get his neck broke for something else," replied the peasant, "If I judge rightly. But we will talk more of that anon. Let us get on."
Forward accordingly they walked, passed another field, and another, and then took their way down a narrow, sandy lane, which in the end opened out from between its high banks upon a long strip of ground covered with short grass, and old hawthorn trees, with many a bank and dingle breaking the turf, and Showing the yellow soil beneath.
"Why, you seem to live on the edge of the forest, ploughman," said the serving-man; "it must be poor ground here, I wot?"
"It's good for my sort of farming," replied the other, shooting a shrewd glance at him, along the side of his very peculiar nose; "you have a mile to go yet, Master Yeoman, and we may as well go through a bit of the woodland."