United States or Palestine ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
There is always something rather taking in the way a duck changes itself in an instant from a slow, clumsy waddler of the earth to a graceful, buoyant swimmer of the waters, and Crefton waited with a certain arrested attention to watch the leader of the file launch itself on to the surface of the pond.
Crefton was glad when he found himself out of earshot, in the quiet and seclusion of the deep overgrown lanes that seemed to lead away to nowhere; one, narrower and deeper than the rest, attracted his footsteps, and he was almost annoyed when he found that it really did act as a miniature roadway to a human dwelling.
I'll put a spell on 'em, the old nuisances." As she limped slowly away her eye caught the chalk inscription on the barn door. "What's written up there?" she demanded, wheeling round on Crefton. "Vote for Soarker," he responded, with the craven boldness of the practised peacemaker. The old woman grunted, and her mutterings and her faded red shawl lost themselves gradually among the tree-trunks.
Crefton gazed with something like horror as a third duck poised itself on the bank and splashed in, to share the fate of the other two.
At a bend of the road he caught a last glimpse of the farm; the old gabled roofs and thatched barns, the straggling orchard, and the medlar tree, with its wooden seat, stood out with an almost spectral clearness in the early morning light, and over it all brooded that air of magic possession which Crefton had once mistaken for peace.
And the vagueness of his alarm added to its terrors; when once you have taken the Impossible into your calculations its possibilities become practically limitless. Crefton rose at his usual early hour the next morning, after one of the least restful nights he had spent at the farm.
The bustle and roar of Paddington Station smote on his ears with a welcome protective greeting. "Very bad for our nerves, all this rush and hurry," said a fellow-traveller; "give me the peace and quiet of the country." Crefton mentally surrendered his share of the desired commodity.
There was a dull, dragging silence around the board, and the tea itself, when Crefton came to taste it, was a flat, lukewarm concoction that would have driven the spirit of revelry out of a carnival. "It's no use complaining of the tea," said Mrs. Spurfield hastily, as her guest stared with an air of polite inquiry at his cup. "The kettle won't boil, that's the truth of it."
"It's Martha Pillamon as has done it," chimed in the old mother; "I'll be even with the old toad. I'll put a spell on her." "It must boil in time," protested Crefton, ignoring the suggestions of foul influences. "Perhaps the coal is damp." "It won't boil in time for supper, nor for breakfast to-morrow morning, not if you was to keep the fire a-going all night for it," said Mrs. Spurfield.
Crefton turned to the hearth, where an unusually fierce fire was banked up under a big black kettle, which sent a thin wreath of steam from its spout, but seemed otherwise to ignore the action of the roaring blaze beneath it. "It's been there more than an hour, an' boil it won't," said Mrs. Spurfield, adding, by way of complete explanation, "we're bewitched."
Word Of The Day