But this Hals would not allow. “Girls cannot fight,” he assured me, gravely. “They can only scratch. Besides, boys cannot fight girls, so it wouldn’t be fair.”
“Then I must fight girls,” said Bess, sadly; “but I’m afraid that wouldn’t be much fun, for girls mostly pinch, and run away.”
The weather was beautiful during Hals’ stay with us. The Shropshire fields and woods seemed all under an enchanter’s wand. Blue mist lay on the Wrekin and on the Clee. Sunshine glowed all the day, and in the evening, glorious sunsets, and tranquil twilights. After tea, we sometimes took Jill, the little pony, and the children rode one behind the other along the lanes. All the hedges were redolent with honeysuckle, and great pink sprays of the most exquisitely lovely of all flowers, the wild dog-rose, curled over branch and stem; whilst larks sang over green seas of rippling wheat, which moved in broad waves over stormless, summer seas.
WE MEET THADY
Far away I showed the children one evening the Brown Clee, the land of witches and romance to Shropshire youth. No rain fell, no tempests gathered. It was June, and the perfection of June weather. Sheets of buttercups glistened in the meadows, moon-daisies nodded in the upland grasses, and over disused lime-kilns blew beds of rosy thyme and rock-roses, whilst here and there, on the outskirts of forest lands, we found the sweetest of all wild flowers—pale butterfly orchises, with their strange sweet perfume, which, as Bess said, made you long to live, only in afternoons. Thady one day joined us in one of our expeditions. He got up from a bush suddenly as we were passing—bare-legged, jovial, courteous, as only an Irish lad can be.
“The ‘top of the morning,’ mam,” he cried, and his face lit up with a simultaneous smile.
“It is afternoon,” I laughed.
“Whatever the hour or the season, ’tis only well I wish yer,” he replied, with the spontaneous politeness of the Celt.
“Have you anything pretty to show us?” I asked.
“Yes,” repeated Bess, “show us something pretty.”