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It was a rainy summer, and the farmers were at their wits'-ends to know how they were to secure their hay in anything like good condition. The Duke was not a man to be beaten by the weather; he defied it; he was determined to have his grass in the rickyard, wet or dry. So the order went forth that his traction-engine and waggons were to be ready for carrying it on a certain day.
A rickyard, hip-high in vegetable rankness and ruin, contained outbuildings from which the thatch had lightly fluttered away, on all the winds of all the seasons of the year, and from which the planks and beams had heavily dropped and rotted.
But a little observation showed that the keeper had a 'habit. He used to come out across the wheatfields to a small wayside 'public, and his route passed by a lonely barn and rickyard. One warm summer day I saw him come as usual to the 'public, and while he was there quietly slipped as far as the barn and hid in it. In July such a rickyard is very hot; heat radiates from every straw.
He slowed up to a walk as he came to Angwin's farm, passed through the dark yard, and through the gates into a field next the rickyard. It was full of folk crowded in from all the countryside.
Whereupon Raleigh kissed the admiral again, and sent loving messages to Jack Hawkins and Dick Grenville and all the other gallant gentlemen that quaffed their ale with eyes on the sea on Plymouth Hoe. Johnnie Morgan stood watching the last wagon from his harvest field go creaking and groaning into the rickyard in the rear of his house.
Here were shelter and rest at last, and no one to scold! She crept in, and was just closing the heavy door when towards her, across the rickyard, came the figure of a man. His head was bent so that she could not see his face, but she thought from his lumbering walk that it must be Peter, and in a moment it flashed across her mind that he had just got back from Cuddingham.
As the footpath winds by the hedge the noise of his footstep startles the blackbird roosting in the bushes, and he bustles out and flies across the field. There is more rime on the posts and rails around the rickyard, and the thatch on the haystack is white with it in places.
So few agricultural people travelled, and news came so slowly and in such distorted fashion, that the coachman became a great authority. Such a brook as this was then often a serious obstacle. There was still an old punt, seldom used, to be found in a rickyard of Hilary's, close by which was an extensive pond. The punt was thatched over with flags from the stream.
He acquired a liking for new laid eggs and hunted the rickyard for nests in the straw. My bailiff determined to cure him; he carefully blew an egg, and filled it with a mixture of which mustard was the chief component.
But she went round through the rickyard that she might have a moment's thought with herself. Not a hand was laid upon her out of the darkness, no faintest sound came to her ears through the silently falling snow. But as she took her way between two ricks, where was just room for her to pass, she felt felt, however, without the slightest sense of material opposition, that she could not go through.
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