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The Sea Rat, as soon as his hunger was somewhat assuaged, continued the history of his latest voyage, conducting his simple hearer from port to port of Spain, landing him at Lisbon, Oporto, and Bordeaux, introducing him to the pleasant harbours of Cornwall and Devon, and so up the Channel to that final quayside, where, landing after winds long contrary, storm-driven and weather-beaten, he had caught the first magical hints and heraldings of another Spring, and, fired by these, had sped on a long tramp inland, hungry for the experiment of life on some quiet farmstead, very far from the weary beating of any sea.
Here and there some squire or huntsman nurtured a particular strain and developed a type which he kept pure, and at many a manor-house and farmstead in Devonshire and Cumberland, on many a Highland estate and Irish riverside where there were foxes to be hunted or otters to be killed, terriers of definite strain were religiously cherished.
Dinah smoothed her apron and bustled forth. It had always been her grievance and her mistress shared it against the nameless architect of Rilla farmstead, that he had made its long kitchen window face upon the strawyard, whereas a sensible man would have designed it to command the front door in flank, with its approaches.
To speak with him, we walked round to the other side of the house, to an open space of grass, where the fowls picked merrily, and the old farm-lumber, broken coops, disused ploughs, lay comfortably about. "How I love tidiness!" wrote Morris once. Yet I did not feel that he would have done other than love all this natural and simple litter of the busy farmstead.
Meanwhile, he thought: "It was well after all that the pastor happened in to-day; now he can see that I know how to maintain order in my Zion." But no sooner was the hymn finished than a man jumped to his feet. It was proud and dignified Ljung Björn Olafsson, who was married to one of the Ingmar girls, and was the owner of a large farmstead in the heart of the parish.
And for his own farmstead, though for the first time on earth a man made here a home; though valor blazed the path; though he laid the foundation of that house in hope and in love set up the gates of it, none knows the name of that man or of his bolder mate. There are no traditions and no ballads.
It was tea-time when she reached Garthowen, and, winter or summer, that was always the pleasantest hour at the farmstead, when the air was filled with the aroma of the hot tea, and the laughter and talk of the household. On the settle in the cosy chimney corner sat Ebben Owens himself, the head of the family and the centre of interest to every member of it.
If it had been a little dog that had chanced to wander that way, when he crossed my path he would have followed it up to the barn and have gone smelling around for a bone; but this sharp, cautious track held straight across all others, keeping five or six rods from the house, up the hill, across the highway towards a neighboring farmstead, with its nose in the air and its eye and ear alert, so to speak.
I had to drive through a ditch and through a fence beyond, and to cross a field in order to strike that road which led from the south through the park into town. A certain farmstead was my landmark. Beyond it I had to watch out sharply if I wanted to find the exact spot where according to my informant the wire of the fence had been taken down. I found it.
He had come there as a child with his father, who had emigrated in his young life from England to the settlement of Pennsylvania, and had afterwards become one of the scattered settlers on the debatable ground between the French and English borders, establishing himself in the heart of the boundless forest, and setting to work with the utmost zeal and industry to gather round himself a little farmstead where he could pass his own later years in peace, and leave it for an inheritance to his two sons.
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