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For ten minutes, perhaps, I had heard from somewhere before me in the wood a strange, continuous noise, as of clucking, cooing, and gobbling, now and again interrupted by a harsh scream. As I advanced towards this noise, it began to grow lighter about me, and I caught sight, through the trees, of sundry gables and enclosure walls, and something like the tops of a rickyard.
Another waggon had shot its load, and was jolting out through the rickyard gate, as we swung ourselves in, shouting, over its tail. Edward was the first up, and, as I gained my feet, he clutched me in a death-grapple. I was a privateersman, he proclaimed, and he the captain of the British frigate Terpsichore, of I forget the precise number of guns.
In the early mornings of the spring, as she came rushing down to breakfast, the tiny yellow panes of the window which faced the east were all lit up and rosy with the rays of the rising sun. The beautiful light came through the elms of the rickyard, away from the ridge of the distant Down, and then for the first hour of the day the room was aglow.
'Well, then, said he, 'I can't pay you till you have done it. No, they couldn't do it, couldn't be expected to carry sacks of wheat across the rickyard and into the barn like that, it was too much for any man to do; why couldn't he send for the cart?
If the bird were rare it would be thought to rival the woodcock; as it is, probably few people ever taste it. The path to Lucketts' Place from this rickyard passed a stone-quarry, where the excavated stone was built up in square heaps.
For ten minutes, perhaps, I had heard from somewhere before me in the wood a strange, continuous noise, as of clucking, cooing, and gobbling, now and again interrupted by a harsh scream. As I advanced towards this noise, it began to grow lighter about me, and I caught sight, through the trees, of sundry gables and enclosure walls, and something like the tops of a rickyard.
At Canterbury heard more particulars of the machine-breaking now going on in the neighbourhood. Notice is given, and the frames are broken. One gentleman boasted at market they should not break his, as he had armed men to protect them. They on the same night set fire to his rickyard. Sir Henry Oxenden's sons went out to meet them, when they came according to notice to break Sir Henry's machines.
He possessed a deal of fowl philosophy, and tells many a good hen story, which, like fish stories, draw rather largely on the credulity of the audience. We were sitting in the rickyard talking comfortably about laying and cackling and kindred matters when he took his pipe from his mouth and told us the following tale not a bad one if you can translate the dialect:
The wheat, and barley, and hay carted home to the rickyard contain the seeds of innumerable plants, many of which, dropping to the ground, come up next year. The trodden earth round where the ricks stood seems favourable to their early appearance; the first poppy blooms here, though its colour is paler than those which come afterwards in the fields.
The slender brush-like tip of the tree bent with their weight, curving over like a whip, to spring up when they left. The rooks were fond of maize, boldly descending among the poultry kept in a rickyard within a short distance of their trees.
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