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At Donkey Street, the neighbours were beginning to get used to young Honisett and his bride, at Rye and Lydd and Romney the farmers had given up expecting Arthur Alce to come round the corner on his grey horse, with samples of wheat or prices of tegs. At Ansdore, too, the breach was healed. Joanna and Ellen lived quietly together, sharing their common life without explosions.
"Nor of her looker he! he!" joined in Furnese with a glance in Joanna's direction. She was talking to Dick Socknersh, who had been to church with the other hands that could be spared from the farm. She asked him if he had liked the sermon, and then told him to get off home quickly and give the tegs their swill. "Reckon he don't know a teg from a tup," said Furnese. "Oh, surelye, Mr.
Joanna had ceased to look for any beauty in her surroundings since Martin's days the small gift of sight that he had given her had gone out with the light of his own eyes, and this evening all she saw was the flooded pastures, which meant poor grazing for her tegs due to come down from the Coast, and her lambs new-born on the Kent Innings.
He come in with him 'twus last Saturday's market over some tegs; and he called in here, and I do believes 'twus to ask how this un here wus. Said he'd allus liked un. Seemed to know all about un. Said as he and the gen'leman as owns un wus allus together; that he couldn't get about like some; and that he and this dog here was never apart, and seemed to hang together, curious ways like.
Father Lawrence came to see her one April day when the young lambs were bleating on the sheltered innings and making bright clean spots of white beside the ewes' fog-soiled fleeces, when the tegs had come down from their winter keep inland, and the sunset fell in long golden slats across the first water-green grass of spring.
Owing to the scanty and salt pastures of winter, it had always been the custom on the marsh to send the young sheep for grazing on upland farms, and fetch them back in the spring as tegs. Joanna disposed of her young flock between Relf of Baron's Grange and Noakes of Mockbeggar, then, still accompanied by Alce, strolled down to inspect the wethers she had brought to the market.
"It's not all dogs, though, that are as shepherds' dogs, Nutt or capable of being." Nutt shook his head. The two men and their dogs were on the hillside, with two hundred and fifty tegs moving before them. The sheep were walking with a wide front, but in single files, following those parallel tracks that had marked this steep hillside for centuries, to puzzle strangers.
If she was away when the shearers came, there'd be no end to their goings on with the girls, and besides, who'd see that the work was done proper and the tegs not scared out of their lives?
Four hundred tegs, ewes, and lambs were in fold on the hill, on a clover stubble, or what remained of it, being given crushed swedes and other things, for keep was scarce so early in the year. The shepherd's boy and his dog were up there with them: only Job and Scot were in the pens.
And now what was to become of the old shepherd, since the new tenant had brought his own men with him? and he, moreover, considered that John, at eighty-five, was too old to tend a flock on the hills, even of tegs.
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