CHAPTER VIII. THE DAY OF SMALL THINGS.
Evan was one of those capable individuals, who, through making good use of eyes and ears, can turn their hands readily to anything. In those days, before the 'division of labour' had been formulated into a creed, the class was more common, and still in remote country places individuals of the type may be found. In addition to his field-work he had helped the shepherd to mend the stone fence of his sheepfold, and had made the ragged roof of the cattle-shed wind and weather proof with the heather Rhys had cut down. He had yet to demonstrate his 'all-round' faculty in the performance of a promise made, in the first place, to Mrs. Edwards, and secondly, to little William.
It was quite a common thing in Wales, as it is in Ireland to this day, for the pigs to wander over the farm, or out in the roads, poking their snouts into the proprietor's kitchen as a matter of course, and making free with root-crops meant for human beings. But as it happened that Mrs. Edwards and Evan had experience of a better state of things, they were agreed as to its adoption.
Consequently, at the beginning of the week, William, who had begun to follow Evan about like a small shadow, was delighted to watch him and Lewis clear away a large space among the outbuildings, and Robert Jones came two or three times with loads of rough stones from a local quarry, which his two patient beasts drew on the singular sleds or sledges that did duty for wheeled carts in those mountain regions.
But it was the process of piling and fitting these loose and shapeless stones on one another, so as to bind together in a firm and compact wall without cement, that kept William dancing with excitement unfelt by either passive Davy or Jonet, to whom a stitch more or less in their knitting appeared of vastly more importance than the raising of a common wall. It might suit William to caper about, or to stagger under a voluntary load of stone, and fancy he was helping, it did not much interest them.
Yet these children were no blinder than the world at large to 'the day of small things.'
But when they noticed the rising walls shaping into two adjoining square enclosures with little doorways, across which he placed long, flat pieces of wood to support the upper courses of stone, and beheld a conical roof rise over each in genuine Welsh form, and learned that the two small houses were for the pigs to live in, Davy himself set up an exclamation of surprise, as Rhys had done before him. And, no doubt, Evan would have been equally surprised had he been told that the beehive form was as ancient as the habitations of those early British ancestors who fled to the Cambrian mountains for refuge from the Roman and Saxon invaders.
Astonishment was exhausted when Williams, the Eglwysilan carpenter, on the Wednesday, brought a couple of stout wooden troughs and gates, for by that time each conical sty had been supplied with a small walled forecourt of its own, and Evan had covered the earthen floors with a thick carpet of dry fern for the pigs to lie upon. And whilst the man was at work fixing up the gates, he made a broom of ling, and began scrubbing the dirty old sow vigorously, to make her fit for her clean abode. The pigs grunted and the children laughed. So did Williams, the carpenter, to whom pig-scrubbing was a novelty. And so did Rhys, who came up the yard at the time, his lip curling with fine scorn.
But Ales, who had lived with her mistress long enough to imbibe her advanced notions of cleanliness, and had, besides, a natural vein of good sense in her composition, called out from the unshuttered dairy window, where she stood drawing a knife through and through the newly-churned butter to remove accidental cow-hairs before making up: 'Them as likes good bacon should be caring for the swine. There's fools as would rather be sticking in the mud than mending the roads.'
Having delivered this oracular rebuke to the scorners, she resumed her butter-making with renewed energy, none the less for the swift glance and smile of approval she had seen on Evan's quickly upturned face.