“Did you see the name on the trunks? Now you mention it, I saw the boy taking a telegraft up to the house yesterday—no, the day before.”
“It was my husband told me about it, when he looked in home just now, and his sight being so poor, he couldn’t see the name” (in spite of the Educational Authorities many of the men in our village cannot read, but by courtesy it is always referred to as poor sight!), “so he asked the station-master if he should drop ’em anywhere, as he had got her ladyship’s cart there. He is helping at the Manor House to-day. He’d just taken some hay to the station, and it seemed a real waste o’ good time to do nothing with it coming back. But the station-master said they was for up here, and old Bob was taking ’em up as the ladies wouldn’t have the fly; said they’d _pefer_ to walk. And, would you believe it, he never so much as thought to ask how many there were. Still, I’ll soon find out and let you know. I’ll go up and ask Abigail if she can oblige me with the loan of a little salt. I’ve a couple of ducks myself as I’d be glad to get four-and-six apiece for if——”
At this moment Abigail appeared at the cottage door, and the gong reverberated and echoed as she gave it a vigorous hammering, calculated to wake me up wherever I might be.
“Good gracious, that’s for her one o’clock dinner!” exclaimed both the women in one breath, and fled in opposite directions, presumably to minister to the raving and the ravenous!
As the conversation had implied, the duck was tough and inadequate; but it was a certain satisfaction to me—as I sought about in vain for a fairly good slice from the breast of the skinny carcase—to reflect that I hadn’t paid for it as yet. I was out when the youthful Perkins had delivered it.
For the rest, I didn’t attach any value to the women’s gossip. Once you have any real footing in a rural district, and have become part and parcel of the country-side, you soon learn that one impossibility is “terrible isolation.” From rosy morn till dewy eve one or another woman is engaged in lengthy gossip with any other she meets, and in nearly every case the topic of exhaustive conversation will be the doings of somebody else; moreover, the less that is actually known about the third and absent party the more two and two will add up to nineteen.