“Well, I lay there not a long while since, a trifle sudden and a trifle hard,” laughed Hirst.
“Ah, now, will ye be quiet? I’m like Fool Billy, as Priscilla said just now, and ye think I’m jesting when I’m trying to talk sober sense.”
“Dinner-time is sober sense, David, judging by my itch to get at cheese and bread and good brown ale. What then, lad? What ails ye?”
“I’m slow of speech, unlike my smithy-bellows,” went on the other doggedly. “I find the right word always the day after to-morrow, instead of the day’s minute that I want it.”
“I’ve a trick of the same kind myself, David. What then? Speech is speech, but trimming a thorn-hedge, or ploughing for your turnip-crop, is a sight better than hunting words. Tuts, David! Ye’re yellow about the gills, and some trouble’s sitting on ye, by that token.”
“Ay, some trouble is,” said David.
“Priscilla gave ye cake and ale?” put in the other anxiously.
“She forgot to offer it, and I forgot to lack it.” David’s eyes followed the neat line of the hedge, and he nodded gravely at it. “Wish men were more like thorn-bushes, John—wish you could lop their unruliness, and twist their ill-grown branches into shape, and make a clean, useful hedge at the end of all.”
Farmer Hirst was thinking of his dinner with gaining tenderness. “What is in your mind, David, lad?” he asked. “’Tis like watching the kettle boil, this getting at your meaning.”
“Reuben Gaunt is back again in Garth,” the smith blurted out. “That’s my meaning, John, and I tell you we could well have let him stay t’ other side of the world, and ne’er have missed him.”