"Service, quo' he," snorted the old Free Kirker; "the rags o' Rome!"
"And besides," continued the curate, without troubling himself with the taunt, "there was so heavy a dew this morning that I did not think you would be leading till the afternoon!"
"Nae mair we wad, if Providence had left us the means o' waitin' till the hay was decently won. But what can a puir auld bereaved couple dae, hirplin' at death's door, baith the twa o' them?"
By this time I was on the stack, and the Hayfork Minister was sending me up armful after armful to settle into its place.
"Tramp, will ye!" shouted the old man; "that wife o' mine has gotten nae heavier on her feet than a cricket on the hearth, or a spider that taketh hold wi' her hands and is in king's pailaces! Tramp, laddie!"
So, as Mr. Ablethorpe forked the hay, I stepped sturdily round, till I, too, was fain to strip to my shirt, and even moisten the sweet-smelling bog hay with the sweat of my brow.
And while we worked old Caleb stood by, and, as he expressed it, "tightly tairged the Apiscopian on doctrine and the Scriptures." Mr. Ablethorpe was certainly at a disadvantage in a theological argument conducted from a hay cart (with a borrowed horse) against an assailant sitting crumbling tobacco into a pipe on the safe eminence of an upturned wheelbarrow.
