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Updated: June 25, 2025
To-day our little camp assumes quite a lively appearance again, three sheep and several fowls having been added to the farm-yard; these, together with three surviving ducks of the real original stock, and a wonderful white Thibetian cock, who owes his life entirely to his highly-cultivated vocal powers, strut about in front of the tent, and give an air of unwonted respectability to the scene.
At last the great day arrived. Early in the morning, before the rising sun flamed against the eastern windows, an ambitious young rooster, perched on the cultivator outside, gave such a loud, croupy call to the farm-yard that he awakened the little girl. She, in turn, awakened her mother.
The man from whom we acquired our farm had in some way domesticated a flock of wild geese, and though they must have been a part of the farm-yard during the winter, they made no deep impression on my mind till in the spring when as the migratory instinct stirred in their blood they all rose on the surface of the water in a little pool near the barn and with beating wings lifted their voices in brazen clamor calling to their fellows driving by high overhead.
Even the hens of the farm-yard cackle with no new tone of hope and animation at the birth of the English Spring. The fact is, it is a baby three months old when it is baptised. It is really born at Christmas instead of Easter, and makes no more stir in the family circle of the seasons than any familiar face would at a farmer's table.
We burst into tears, thinking we were to be similarly equipped, and would have fled, had flight been possible; all the riches in the world we would have counted a mean reward to the person who would have transported us from the tyrant's farm-yard to the beautiful hills and valleys of Scotland.
And after breakfast, the Vicar, though with a bad grace, buttoned up his long black coat, and took his way, accompanied by his brother and his wife, up the steep path to Dinas. It was an early hour certainly, not yet eleven o'clock; but "calling" was unknown at Abersethin, and it was not the unseasonableness of the hour which made Shoni stare as the three visitors entered the "clos" or farm-yard.
But every time she put her chubby arms around a slab, it broke in two; so her brothers told her to stop. Then she climbed to the wagon-seat and drove the horses beside the furrows, and, later, went to the farm-yard with a load. The smoke-house was being built beside the corn-cribs.
A stately squadron of snowy geese were riding in an adjoining pond, convoying whole fleets of ducks; regiments of turkeys were gobbling through the farm-yard, and guinea fowls fretting about it, like ill-tempered housewives, with their peevish, discontented cry.
It was long before he learned that for weeks Gunn was unable to hurt one of them; that his drinking, his late wound, and the blow Clare had given him, brought on him a severe attack of erysipelas. When they reached the farm-yard, Clare knew by the aspect of things that the cattle were housed and the horses suppered.
Daphne brought the dishes, and when everything was ready, Lydia sent Chloe to call her husband and the Stranger, while she herself went out to the farm-yard. She found Dion and Argos sitting side by side on the wood-pile in dejected silence. "Come in and wash your hands," she said to Dion. "If you get yourself clean, wrists and all, you may have your supper with us, but remember, no sausage.
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