“But we call that a lane in England.”
“Well, it’s a boreen in Ireland. I’m right glad ye’re takin’ me on.”
“I don’t say so for a minute, but I’ll speak to the missis about you.”
The “missis” was busy “scalding,” as she called it, a great dish of hot meal for the fowls. She was a stout, red-faced woman, an excellent wife of a farmer. As the farmer and Peggy entered the kitchen the dish, an enormous one, nearly slipped from her hand, and a little bit of the very hot meal scalded her fingers. In one instant Peggy had rushed up and nipped the dish from her.
“Why, ma’am, for mercy’s sake, don’t hould it like that; ye’ll get yerself scalded all to nothing! Let me go out an’ feed the hins. I’d love to be at it!”
“Who in the world is the child?” asked the astonished woman; but Peggy did not wait for any explanations with regard to her whereabouts or who she was. With that dish of hot, comforting food in her arm, she was once again back at Ballyshannon, as she called her home in the County Kerry; once again the sniff of the warm meal assailed her nostrils, her dark-blue eyes sparkled with ecstasy, and she ran into the yard and made a peculiar shout to the fowls, the unmistakable shout which every highly respectable fowl in the whole of Christendom understands, the shout which means food, and nothing but food. They surrounded her in a trice—geese, ducks, hens, chickens, turkeys. With the utmost carefulness and the most splendid genius, she arranged her food, giving the fierce gobblers the coarse bits, and reserving the dainty morsels for the little chickens and the small “hins,” as she called them. The farmer and the farmer’s wife watched her from the door of the house.
“I never did!” said the farmer. “If you believe me, Mary Ann, I might have been cut in two by a knife at that minute, to see her sitting as cool as brass on the back of Nimrod, with no more fear than if she were sitting in the easy-chair by the fire! And now look at her with those fowls. Whoever on earth is she? She’s more like a fairy than a girl.”
“We must find out who she is. She’s too well-dressed to belong to us, and yet she’s the very gal after my own heart,” said the farmer’s wife. “I want a hearty, clever, natty sort of creature who’ll do her work in a jiff without having to be told anything.”
Peggy, having got the fowls quite satisfied with their breakfast, now came up glibly. “Where’s the milkin’-pails?” she asked.
“Why, you bit of a girl, you can’t milk cows,” said the farmer, laughing as he spoke.