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The nunnery is now, I believe, held in lease by the city of Oxford, which has converted its precincts into a barn-yard. The gate was under lock and key, so that we could merely look at the outside, and soon resumed our places in the boat.
I'd been out at work all day about the place, slicking things up for to-morrow; there was a gap in the barn-yard fence to mend, I left that till the last thing, I remember, I remember everything, some way or other, that happened that day, and there was a new roof to put on the pig-pen, and the grape-vine needed an extra layer of straw, and the latch was loose on the south barn-door; then I had to go round and take a last look at the sheep, and toss down an extra forkful for the cows, and go into the stall to have a talk with Ben, and unbutton the coop-door to see if the hens looked warm, just to tuck 'em up, as you might say.
Or on a Sunday afternoon, if I chanced to be at home, I heard the cronching of the snow made by the step of a long-headed farmer, who from far through the woods sought my house, to have a social "crack"; one of the few of his vocation who are "men on their farms"; who donned a frock instead of a professor's gown, and is as ready to extract the moral out of church or state as to haul a load of manure from his barn-yard.
He did not like anything that tasted or smelt of Bohemianism in the personnel of literature, but he did not mind the scent of the new-ploughed earth, or even of the barn-yard.
For upward of forty-five years Isom had been taking the rains as they came wherever they might find him. It made him growl to turn tail to them now, and trot to shelter from every shower like a hen. So he was in no sweet humor as he drew near his own barn-yard gate with the early autumn downpour already finding its way through his coat.
With them went Satan, through the barn-yard gate, where they huddled in a corner a shamed and terrified group. A tall overseer stood at the gate. "Ten of 'em!" he said grimly.
Two women just then came along; they lifted and flirted their skirts, for it was raining, and this disturbed him again and decided him to take to the farm lane. Up the lane he went, rather doubtingly, I thought. In a few moments it brought him into a barn-yard, where a group of hens caught his eye.
She peeped in the cow-house was perfectly empty; and cautiously, and with many a fearful glance to the right and left, lest some terrible horned animal should present itself, Ellen made her way across the cow-house, and through the barn-yard, littered thick with straw wet and dry, to the lower barn-floor. The door of this stood wide open. Ellen looked with wonder and pleasure when she got in.
Although it was now the early part of September, the air was warm and balmy, and barn-yard fowls were clucking and scratching about the rather meager soil around the houses and outbuildings.
You barn-yard tramps go hoggin' the road on the high seas with no blame consideration fer your neighbours, an' your eyes in your coffee-cups instid o' in your silly heads." At this the skipper danced on the bridge and said something about Disko's own eyes. "We haven't had an observation for three days. D'you suppose we can run her blind?" he shouted. "Wa-al, I can," Disko retorted.
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