"There is land attached to the mill yet? Do you farm it, as your predecessor did?"
Old Rotherson smiled grimly.
"Yes, I farm it—after a fashion. But it's sadly like trying to skin a flint, as the saying goes. You've a hard country up here, Mr. Lomax."
"For grass, yes. But we're fine when it comes to growing heather."
"And what good is heather, I'd like to know?" quoth the practical miller. "It will make a broom to sweep my floors with, but what else can you do with it? There's one other thing that grows well hereabouts, though; one of my fields is as full as it will hold of parsley, and I can't make it out. Never a bit of parsley-seed have I sown; yet up it comes as if the seed had been raining from the sky."
Griff chuckled, and his host glanced at him inquiringly.
"Hares are very fond of parsley; wonderfully fond," murmured the younger man, with a sly look in his eyes.
"Well, so they are. Only last night I was looking out of my bedroom window, and I counted five all at once in the field. But that doesn't help me to know how the parsley came there."
"It is curious," said Griff. But he hinted never a word of the old-time nights when he and Jack o' Ling Crag had gone out salting their neighbours' fields with parsley-seed.
They rambled on from this topic to that, till they were startled by a mighty sob that came from across the hearth. Gabriel Hirst, wrapped all this while in his own miserable thoughts, had instinctively given vent to the despair at his heart.