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Near the second level-crossing, that went over many bright rails, was a farm belonging to the collieries, and a great round globe of iron, a disused boiler, huge and rusty and perfectly round, stood silently in a paddock by the road. The hens were pecking round it, some chickens were balanced on the drinking trough, wagtails flew away in among trucks, from the water.
"Has she asked help of you?" said the wife. "Truly; but I know not what says she, for I read not, but I know her pecking. Here it is. But you must be secret." Looking through a crack in the floor, I could plainly see them. She took the letter from him and read aloud: "If Gabord the soldier have a good heart still, as ever he had in the past, he will again help a poor friendless woman.
It was a sheet of streaky white, smooth or hummocky according to varying effects of wind and falling levels. Far out on its surface he saw two black dots that were a pair of ravens, walking in dignified fashion and pecking at some indistinguishable treasure trove.
In this disguise of course with the feathered side of him presented to the bird or beast he would get near to he walks along, pecking with the head at the bushes, and imitating the motions of the ostrich. By this stratagem he very often is enabled to get within shot of the other ostriches, or the quaggas and gnoos which consort with these birds."
There in the garden was Miss Blythe herself, in a cottage bonnet and long gloves, busily hoeing with little pecks at a raised flower-bed of the size of a tea-tray. She looked up when Ezra paused at the gate, nodded with brisk preciseness in answer to his salutation, and then went on industriously pecking at the flower-bed. "My weekly paper has just arrived, Miss Blythe," said Ezra.
The great manure heap in the middle; the carts under cover, with perhaps one or two American reapers and binders among them; fowls pecking here and there; a thin predatory dog nosing about; a cart-horse peering from his stable and now and then scraping his hoofs; a very wide woman at the dwelling-house door; the old farmer in blue linen looking on; and there, drawn up, listening to their Captain, row on row of blue-coated men, all hard-bitten, weary, all rather cynical, all weather-stained and frayed, and all ready to go on for ever.
And then the tiled roof of cottage and homestead, of the long cow-shed where generations of the milky mothers have stood patiently, of the broad-shouldered barns where the old-fashioned flail once made resonant music, while the watch-dog barked at the timidly venturesome fowls making pecking raids on the outflying grain the roofs that have looked out from among the elms and walnut-trees, or beside the yearly group of hay and corn stacks, or below the square stone steeple, gathering their grey or ochre-tinted lichens and their olive-green mosses under all ministries, let us praise the sober harmonies they give to our landscape, helping to unite us pleasantly with the elder generations who tilled the soil for us before we were born, and paid heavier and heavier taxes, with much grumbling, but without that deepest root of corruption the self-indulgent despair which cuts down and consumes and never plants.
Two months or more run along, and my clothes got to be all rags and dirt, and I didn't see how I'd ever got to like it so well at the widow's, where you had to wash, and eat on a plate, and comb up, and go to bed and get up regular, and be forever bothering over a book, and have old Miss Watson pecking at you all the time. I didn't want to go back no more.
"Put my yellow waistcoat back where you got it, ke-whack!" said the stake-driver, shivering. "It's cold in here, and how shall I go to the party without it, ke-whack!" "Your yaller wescut?" said Bob. "I haint got no wescut, ke-whack or no ke-whack." "You must put that away!" said the fly-up-the-creek, pecking his long nose at the gold key. "Ke-whack! ke-whack!"
But we felt that there was yet a chance for us to turn the tables, for Goodell was still with the troop, and also Gregory; we saw them both the morning of the fifth day. "It beats me why they're pecking around over the same ground so much," Mac observed.
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