"You have helped me to do a full half field more than I should have done. But the hardest part of the day is to come, brother."
Leo wished to lie down and brood over the words of the Crab. The Girl went away to talk to the cultivator's wife and baby, and the afternoon ploughing began.
"Help us now," said the Bull. "The tides of the day are running down. My legs are very stiff. Sing, if you never sang before."
"To a mud-spattered villager?" said Leo.
"He is under the same doom as ourselves. Are you a coward?" said the Bull.
Leo flushed, and began again with a sore throat and a bad temper. Little by little he dropped away from the songs of the Children and made up a song as he went along; and this was a thing he could never have done had he not met the Crab face to face. He remembered facts concerning cultivators and bullocks and rice-fields that he had not particularly noticed before the interview, and he strung them all together, growing more interested as he sang, and he told the cultivator much more about himself and his work than the cultivator knew. The Bull grunted approval as he toiled down the furrows for the last time that day, and the song ended, leaving the cultivator with a very good opinion of himself in his aching bones. The Girl came out of the hut where she had been keeping the children quiet, and talking woman-talk to the wife, and they all ate the evening meal together.
"Now yours must be a very pleasant life," said the cultivator; "sitting as you do on a dyke all day and singing just what comes into your head. Have you been at it long, you two—gipsies?"
"Ah!" lowed the Bull from his byre. "That's all the thanks you will ever get from men, brother."
"No. We have only just begun it," said the Girl; "but we are going to keep to it as long as we live. Are we not, Leo?"
"Yes," said he; and they went away hand in hand.