LAD-LASS.
THE white walls of the farmhouse were hot and blinding to look upon in the sunlight, and the row of scoured dairy-pans and vessels that leaned against them blazed in spots like the sun himself. The hills across the narrow Dale quivered in the June afternoon as if seen over a furnace of charcoal, and no sounds were heard but the soft clucking of poultry and the heavy droning of the bees as they spun in and out of the bass-hives. The sky was of a bleached blue; the dripping from the spout of the pump dried where it fell on the baked earth; the smell of hay and hot dust filled the air; and in the grey limestone village lower down the valley not a soul was to be seen abroad.
Harriet Stubbs stood in her dairy at an upright churn. The lime-washed walls glowed with imprisoned sunlight, and only a narrow strip of shade lay without the door. She was six-and-thirty, too tall, too thin, too quick-moving. Rusty freckles gathered thickly over the bridge of her nose and spread over a face that was of the hue of washleather. Her lips had no red; the lower one was dented with an old frost-bite, now healed; and over the upper one a few straggling hairs showed. Her arms as she churned were sinewy as those of a man; and her bluntly-lidded grey eyes were searching and shrewish.
A rank whiff of tobacco came on the hot air, and a man of fifty crossed the bright yard and entered the dairy. She did not stop churning.
“Put that pipe out, Henry Butler; I’ll ha’ no reek i’ my dairy,” she cried; “I had a kern o’ butter as rank as owd hippins last week wi’ one o’ yon gormless wenches settin’ a stinkin’ cheese o’ th’ shelf; th’ De’il himself couldna watch some o’ ye.—An’ what brings ye up fro’ th’ Cotes?”
“I put a owd apron ower th’ horse’s head an’ rade up,” said the farmer, mopping his brow with an old snuff-handkerchief; “it’s blistering hot!”
“If ye cam’ thro’ th’ Cotes to tell me that I’m obliged to ye, but I kenned it, thank ye.”
“Nay, I come for a bit crack wi’ ye, Harriet, aboot yon lad o’ mine.”