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"You'd better go, Wendy, and see if you can find her, and tell her to come at once and fetch her baby." So Wendy went up the lane to the farm, and asked at the front door and the back door, and looked round the stack-yard and the buildings, but there was never a trace of the gipsy girl.
"Oh," said Philip, "don't I wish we had a lot of the faggots out of the stack-yard." "Let's fetch some," said Fred, which would have been a capital plan, only the faggots would have been rather awkward things to carry through the thick underwood; and, besides, they could only have carried one each, and home was now about four miles off, while they would have wanted at least twenty.
THE sun stared brazenly down on a gray farmhouse lying, long and low in the shadow of the Muir Pike; on the ruins of peel-tower and barmkyn, relics of the time of raids, it looked; on ranges of whitewashed outbuildings; on a goodly array of dark-thatched ricks. In the stack-yard, behind the lengthy range of stables, two men were thatching.
When the corn is gathered into the stack-yard, and the leaves fall on the road, and the air has a touch of frost, and the evenings draw in, then the townsman begins to shiver and bethink him of his home. He leaves the fading glory with a sense of relief, like one escaping from approaching calamity, and as often as his thoughts turn thither, he pities us in our winter solitude.
Three or four cows, of the tawny hue that looked so home-like to the brothers, were being released from the stack-yard after being milked, and conducted to their field by a tall, white-haired man in a farmer's smock with a little child perched on his shoulder, who gave a loud jubilant cry at the sight of the riders.
The steading's a' in a low, and the bonny stack-yard lying in the red ashes, and the gear a' driven away. But gang na forward; it wad break your young heart, hinny, to see what my auld een hae seen this morning." "And who has dared to do this? let go my bridle, Annaple where is my grandmother my sisters? Where is Grace Armstrong? God! the words of the warlock are knelling in my ears!"
Then, standing on the topmost step, and holding her friend's hand in hers, she spoke to the Maid of Galloway in a tone hushed and regretful, as one speaks of the dead. "No, Margaret," she said, "he will no more play with us. Hide-and-seek about the stack-yard ricks at the Mains is over in the gloamings. Sir Sholto cares no more for us. He has put away childish things.
The boys had worked hard in the field; turning the hay, making it into cocks, tossing them out, and then helping to load the waggon, and taking the high-piled load to the stack-yard the part the boys managed in taking the load being that of riding on the top amidst the sweet-scented new hay, and having to lie flat down as the mass passed beneath the tall gateway and under the granary into the yard.
This complication of weathers being uncommon, was all the more to be feared. Oak returned to the stack-yard. All was silent here, and the conical tips of the ricks jutted darkly into the sky. There were five wheat-ricks in this yard, and three stacks of barley. The wheat when threshed would average about thirty quarters to each stack; the barley, at least forty.
Knowing that it was time to get up, although it was not yet light, I had a sense of being awakened into a romantic new world, a world of heroic action. As we stumbled down the stairs, we found the lamp-lit kitchen empty of the men. They had finished their coffee and were out in the stack-yard oiling the machine and hitching the horses to the power.
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