"Then it isn't," answered Martha Jane. "It's an animal as comes from nowhere, and you've to put it in the pinfold this minute, Mrs. Grooby says."
"Aw, indeed!" remarked the pinder. "An' I wonder how she'd like breaking off her dinner to put pigs in pound. Howsumever——"
There were boys and girls coming from school just then, and Mr. Burton enlisted their services in driving the stray pig out of the widow's garden and conducting it to the place of incarceration. Pig-like, as soon as it began to be chivied it showed a powerful inclination to go anywhere but where it was wanted to go. In a few moments the quiet street was riotous with noise and commotion.
The pinfold lay in the shadow of the old lych-gate which gave admittance to the churchyard, the spreading yew-trees, and the ancient church itself. Like all the rest of the things about it, it was grey and time-worn, and redolent of a long-dead past. A square enclosure of grey, lichen-covered walls, against one of which stood the village stocks, against another the mounting-steps from which many a fine old squire and sprightly damsel had taken saddle to ride homeward after church, its interior, now rarely used, was a mass of docks and nettles; its door was green and mouldy, and would scarce have withstood a couple of sturdy kicks from a stout ass. When that door was opened, however, for the reception of captives, most of them backed away.
The pig proved himself as unwilling to enter the pound as any of his many predecessors. He looked in, saw the uninviting gloom, the nettles, the docks, the absence of anything amongst which he could root, and he turned and made valiant efforts to escape his captors. He doubled this way and that; he struggled out of corners; he tried to wriggle through the lych-gate. The pinder, remembering his interrupted dinner, shouted; the boys yelled; the girls screamed. But the stray pig, dodging hither and thither, still eluded their attempts to impound him, though he now screamed a little and was getting short of breath. Suddenly he collapsed against the churchyard wall, as if wearied out.
It was at this moment that Miss Lavinia Dorney, who occupied the pretty house and garden close to the church, came down to the foot of her lawn, attracted by the unwonted commotion, and beheld the exhausted pig and his tormentors. Miss Lavinia was a spinster lady of fine presence, very noble and dignified in manner, who was noted for her shawls and her caps, both of which she wore with distinction. She looked very imposing as she stood there, half-concealed by the shining holly-hedge whose neatly clipped edges fitted in so well with the elegance of their surroundings, and Burton touched his cap, the boys pulled their forelocks, and the girls curtsied.
"Dear me!" exclaimed Miss Lavinia, lifting a pair of elegantly-mounted pince-nez to the bridge of her aristocratic nose. "Dear me, what a noise! Oh, that's you, James Burton, isn't it? And what is all this commotion about?"
"We want to get that there pig into the pinfold, mum," answered the pinder, wiping his forehead. "But it's the contrariest beast ever I see! It's eaten up nearly all Mistress Grooby's kitchen garden."
Miss Lavinia looked more closely and saw the fugitive.
"Dear me!" she said. "It must be hungry, Burton. Whose animal is it?"