CHAPTER IX.
THE KYLOE COW.
“Barbara! Wife!”
“I am here, Myles, straining the milk. I shall make some furmety for supper. Even Lora begins to beg for it, and the boys dote upon it, little knaves!”
“Let the furmety wait for a bit, and come out here to see old Manomet in the evening light. ’Tis a sight I never tire of.”
“Ay, ’tis very fair,” replied Barbara coldly, as she came and sat for a moment upon the bench at the cottage door, where Myles was wont to smoke his pipe, and muse upon many matters never brought to words.
A little lower down the hill Alick and his brother Myles were playing with John and Joseph Alden, while Betty, a stick in her hand, drove all four boys before her, she with mimic airs of anger and they of terror.
“Very fair!” echoed the captain irritably. “You know naught and care less for Nature, Bab. Your thought never gets beyond your furmety pot or Alick’s breeches.”
“And that’s all the better for you and Alick, Myles,” replied the wife in her usual placid tones; but then, with one of those sudden revulsions by which placid people occasionally surprise their friends, she drew in her breath with something between a sob and a groan and burst out:
“Oh, Myles! Myles! Nature do you call it, and I not love the face of Nature do you say! Nay, man, this is not Nature, these dark woods and barren sands and lonesome hills, with never a chimney in sight,—that’s not the Nature I love and long for. My heart goes back to the pleasant fields and good old hills of Man. There are mountains grander by far than yon dark Manomet, as you call it, and yet pranked all over with cottages, where honest folk find a home and the stranger is ever welcome. And then the fair valleys between, with the peaceful steads where men are born and die in sight of their fathers’ graves, and the old thatched roofs, and the stonecrop on the walls, and the roses clambering over the casements, and oh, the little kyloe cows coming home at night, and the poultry”—