“Ef we’re rich now, dear heart, and can ride in our own coach, ’tis the Lord’s hand, not ours. Oi watched over wheat and winter beans, and ’arly peas, and winter oats, and then spring barley, but all the time the Lord was watchin’ over me.”
“Not as a scarecrow,” said Martha severely.
“Oi warn’t a scarecrow ploughin’-time, bein’ set on the middle hoss to flick the whip, and chance times when ’twas too frosty to plough Oi went to Dame Pippler’s to school.”
“I never heard that before,” said Martha.
“Dedn’t like to tell ye,” he confessed, “being as ’twas too cowld to howd the slate-pencil, and the book-larnin’ leaked out ’twixt the frosts. ’Twas a penny a week wasted.”
Martha saw their visitor was amused at this revelation after fifty years of wedlock. “Jinny wants to be going on,” she observed testily. “Look at all her boxes.”
“Oi’m proper pleased to see ’em, for as Oi says to Willie, Oi hope as you ain’t hart Jinny’s business and grieved the Lord. Ye can’t sleep, Oi says, ef ye’ve grieved the Lord.”
“Then Mr. Flippance must be a saint,” laughed Jinny. But she was touched to tears.
Caleb had, however, not finished his apologia for his lack of learning, and was to be diverted neither by Jinny’s jests nor his wife’s grimaces. “And in the summer,” he explained carefully, “Oi got to goo out with my liddle old gun agin they bird-thieves, though peas and pebbles was all the shot my feyther——”
“Can’t you try some at Mr. Flippance’s window?” interrupted Jinny, fearful the fretful Martha would soon close her door upon her.