'Name o' goodness!' she cried, 'what brings you here this time o' day? Look you, father, here's little Willem Edwards!'
The weaver, then changing his shuttle, looked out from his casement window, and in two minutes was at the door questioning the wanderer.
Without any shyness or reservation the boy told where he had been, and for what; his brother's initiative remarks with the rest.
Cate, now a rosy-cheeked, buxom lass on the borderland of womanhood, began to laugh outright, as she had often laughed before when Rhys amused her with some story of William's out-of-the-way questions.
Her father checked her sternly. 'What do you be laughing at?'
''Deed, he do be so queer. Rhys do say he be always at play with bits of stones. And now he asks if they do grow like trees. Oh, Willem, you are droll!'
Again her laugh broke out. William, child though he was, crimsoned to the roots of his brown hair. He seemed to comprehend that Rhys had made a jest of him, and no one is more sensitive to ridicule than a child of tender years.
'Carry your pitchers into the house, and stay there!' cried her father. Then turning to the boy, who hesitated whether to linger or walk on, he said kindly—
'Never mind Cate, my little man, she talks foolishness. Come and sit on this bench beside me. I'll try to serve instead of Robert Jones.'
William's face lit up. He climbed to a seat by the weaver's side, content to find he was no longer laughed at. And very intently he listened to Owen's simple explanation that the mountain was nearly all stone, and that a quarry was the place where strong men broke away the stone for building walls and houses, and that the mountains had been there ever since God created the world, so that he did not think stone grew. And if Owen's was not a learned geological definition, it was all the better adapted to juvenile comprehension. But, simple as it was, a shower of whys and hows were rained on the exponent during its course.