"Loss and gain!" scoffed Anthony; "all loss and no gain!"
Luke would surmise that all was not right, he was keen-sighted—he had already had the impertinence to give an oblique admonition to Anthony to be tender and forbearing to his wife. If he went to him now, Luke would nail him, and hammer remonstrances into him.
By heaven! no—he wanted no sermons preached to him on week-days.
He walked to the door of Farmer Cudlip. The Cudlips had been on that estate much as the Cleverdons had been at Hall, for centuries, but the Cudlips had owned their own land, as yeomen, whereas the Cleverdons had been tenant-farmers. Now the Cleverdons had taken a vast stride up the ladder, whereas the Cudlips, who had given their name to the hamlet, had remained stationary. The Cudlips, though only yeomen, were greatly respected. Some of the gentle families were of mushroom growth compared with them. It was surmised that the Cudlips had originally been Cutcliffs, and that this yeoman family had issued from the ancient stock of Cutcliffe of Damage, in North Devon, which had gone forth like a scriptural patriarch and made itself a settlement on the verge of the moor, and called the land after its own name; but there was no evidence to prove this. It was at one time a conjecture of a Hector of Peter Tavy, who mentioned it to the Cudlip then at Cudliptown, who shrugged his shoulders and said, "It might be for ought he knew." In the next generation the descent was talked about as all but certain, in the third it was a well-established family tradition.
Anthony stood in the doorway of the old ancestral farm. He had knocked, but received no answer; no one had come to the door in response. He knew or guessed the reason, for overhead he heard Mistress Cudlip putting the youngest child to bed; he had heard the little voice of the child raised in song, chanting its evening hymn:—
Matthew, Mark, Luke and John,
Bless the bed that I lay on.
Four angels to my bed,
Two to bottom, two to head;