“Unked, Bart! Well, what if it does? These are unked days.”
“Ay; but each time you sings that I seem to see the rocks along by the shore at home, with the ivy hanging down, and the sheep feeding, and the sea rolling in, and the blue sky, with gulls a-flying; and it makes me feel like a boy again, and, big as I am, as if I should cry.”
“Always were like a big boy, Bart. Hoe away, lad; the overseer’s looking.”
Bart went on chopping weeds, diligently following his friend’s example, as a sour-looking, yellow-faced man came by, in company with a soldier loosely shouldering his musket. But they passed by without speaking, and Abel continued—
“There’s sea here, and blue sky and sunshine.”
“Ay,” said Bart; “there’s sunshine hot enough to fry a mack’rel. Place is right enough if you was free; but it ar’n’t home, Abel, it ar’n’t home.”
“Home! no,” said the young man, savagely. “But we have no home. She spoiled that.”
There was an interval of weed-chopping and clod-breaking, the young men’s chains clanking loudly as they worked now so energetically that the overseer noted their proceedings, and pointed them out as examples to an idle hand.
“Ah! you’re a hard ’un, Abel,” remarked Bart, after a time.
“Yes; and you’re a soft ’un, Bart. She could always turn you round her little finger.”