Deep Moat Grange

by S. R. Crockett

We slid back through the woods, rising higher all the time as the land trended toward the moor. Then out and away across the road I could see far away to the right the roofs of Breckonside, shining like silver after a shower which must have passed over them, the winding Brom Water, the threaded roads, pale pink in colour, the dry stone dykes dividing the fields. Never had my native village seemed so small to me. Perhaps because I had just been in some considerable danger, a thing which enlarges the mental horizon. I looked for Elsie's house down there. But though I could see the silver glint of the water, I could not make out the cottage at the Bridge End. There was a mist, however, creeping up from the sea, so that in a little while, even as I looked, the whole valley became a pearl-grey lake, with only the tall ash trees and the solitary church spire standing up out of the smother.

We found old Caleb, an infrequent smile on his face, leaning over the bars of his yard gate.

"Them that hasna their hay weel covered," he chuckled, "runs a chance o' gettin' it sprinkled a wee!"

"Then," said Mr. Ablethorpe, "you owe me something for the afternoon's work I gave you!"

"Yon!" cried the old man, ungratefully, "caa ye that half a day's wark? But I'm far frae denyin' that, sic as it was, it helped. Ow, ay, it was aye a help! And at ony rate the hay's under cover—some thack-and-rape, and some in the new-fangled shed. But what's your wull? Ye are no seekin' wages, I'm thinkin'. Maybe ye want me to turn my coat and come doon to your bit tabernacle? Aweel, ye may want."

"Oh, no," said Mr. Ablethorpe, smiling. "I was just hoping that perhaps your good wife would brew us a cup of tea. I think both Joe and I would be the better of it."

You should have seen how the old farmer's face lit up. Hospitality was a beautiful thing to him. He rejoiced in that, at least. And if, as some folk say—not Mr. Ablethorpe—an elder is the same as a bishop, then the old Free Kirker had at least one of the necessary qualities. He was "given to hospitality." Whether he was, as is also required, "no striker," I would not just like to say, or to try.

But Caleb took us indoors out of the slight oncoming drizzle, which was beginning to spray down from the clouds, or creep up from the valleys—I am not sure which. At any rate, it was there, close-serried, wetting.

Now heretofore I had only seen Mrs. Caleb when she was ordered down from the long stack under the zinc-roofed shed, which her husband was never tired of declaiming against as "new-fangled," yet to which he owed that night the safety of his crop.

Mrs. Caleb was a good twenty years younger than her lord, still, indeed, bearing traces of that special kind of good looks which the Scots call "sonsiness." Susan Fergusson at five-and-forty was sonsy to the last degree. Her husband, twenty years older, was sun-dried and wind-dried and frost-bitten till he had become sapless as a leaf blown along the highway on a bask March day, when the fields are full of sowers, and the roads cloudy with "stoor."