"Aye, well enough," groaned Robert; "but it's so beautiful. I cannot choose but cry!"
"Is't th' music, feyther?" inquired his daughter.
"Nay, nay--it's them there little stacks. Eh, they're--they're gradely. I never see sich a seet i' my life."
If this was not susceptibility, I don't know where to look for it.
No doubt a certain roughness of speech, an almost brutal frankness, is a noticeable northern characteristic. It strikes a stranger painfully, but is accepted and even appreciated by those accustomed to it from childhood.
A sick man expects to be told he looks real bad, and preserves an unmoved tranquillity on hearing how small a likelihood there is of his ever looking up again, and what a deal of trouble he gives. The visitor unused to our ways shrinks from hearing these subjects discussed in the presence of the patient, but he himself listens philosophically, and, it would occasionally appear, with an odd pleasure in his own importance.
"Eh, I sometimes think it 'ud be a mercy if th' Lord 'ud tak' him," says the middle-aged daughter of a paralysed labourer, eyeing him dispassionately. "Doctor says he'll never be no better, an' I'm sure he's a misery to hissel', as well's every one else. Aren't ye, feyther?"
"Ah," grunts feyther. "I'd be fain to go. I would--I'd be fain."
"What wi's restin' so bad o' neets, an' th' gettin' up an' down to him, an' feedin' him, an' shiftin' him--he's that 'eavy I cannot stir him mysel'--I 'ave to wait till th' lads comes back fro' work--eh, it's weary work! I'm very nigh killed wi't."
"Well, but if he gets better, you know," suggests the visitor, "you'll be glad to have nursed him so well."
"Eh, he'll noan get better now; doctor says he hasn't a chance."
The patient, who has been listening with close attention, and not a little satisfaction, to his daughter's report, now rolls his eyes towards his interlocutor.
"Nay, nay, I'll noan get better," he observes somewhat resentfully. "Tisn't to be expected. I'm gettin' on for seventy-eight, an' this here's my second stroke."
"Ah, his constitution's worn out," adds the woman; "that was what doctor said. ''Tisn't to be expected as he could recover,' says he; 'his constitution's worn out.'"
The rugged old face on the pillow is indeed lined and wrinkled; the one big hand lying outside the coverlet is gnarled and knotted, like the branch of an ancient tree; the form outlined by the bedclothes is of massive proportions. A fine wreck of a man this useless cumberer of the earth.