United States or Réunion ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
The same spirit that sowed darnel among wheat at night in a corn field of Galilee, two thousand years ago, will set fire to a stackyard, or hamstring the horses, or shoot the overseer from behind a hedge in our own day, and, alas! in some parts of our own land. As in the highest good, so in the deepest evil, there are diversities of operation by the same spirit.
And they went back together towards the house. ii Colin's and Anne's work was done for the day. The hay in the Broad Pasture was mown and dried. Tomorrow it would be heaped into cocks and carried to the stackyard. It was the evening of Eliot's first day. He and Anne sat out under the apple trees in the orchard. "What on earth have you done to Colin?" he said.
There was a thick bit of a wood behind the stackyard at the big house, and as I lay listening to the sounds of the early morning there came often of late this clear melody, not loud but sweet and thrilling, as I had heard Ronny McKinnon whistle and Dan too, and the words of that tune are not to be talked about; but when I went quietly to the planting one morning there was only the little moving of birds in the greyness of the morning and the stillness of the wood.
The old grey house at home, quaint and weather-beaten, rose before him. He saw his mother's herb-garden, the great stackyard, and the dry moat, half filled with blackberry bushes, in which he had played as a boy. And on him fell a strange calm, between apathy and resignation. This, then, was his punishment. He would bear it like a man.
Saunderson or his son. Both were busied in the stackyard. Well pleased to escape excuse and the questions it might provoke, Kenelm therefore put on the coat he had laid aside and joined Jessie, who had waited for him at the gate. They entered the lane side by side, following the stream of villagers who were slowly wending their homeward way.
Meantime, more and more people kept crowding into the wood, and the idea spread that some disaster was imminent. "My John's out with the trawler!" wailed one woman. "I wish I'd not let him go! As like as not he'll be wrecked!" "You never know!" agreed a friend. Old Grandfather Treasure, who had hobbled up from the stackyard, quoted texts from Scripture and began to improve the occasion.
Brown of the Bulls pulled himself together for a moment, once more to assure us that he was "Satisfied so far." But the day's entertainment was only just beginning for after comparing weights and heights, Mac, Jack, Dan and Brown of the Bulls, entered into a trial of strength, and a heavy rail having been brought down from the stackyard, the "caber" was tossed before an enthusiastic company.
"Then why do you not invite your nephew, Captain M'Intyre, who is mentioned by every one as a fine spirited young fellow, to become a member of your family?" "Who?" exclaimed Monkbarns, "my nephew Hector? the Hotspur of the North? Why, Heaven love you, I would as soon invite a firebrand into my stackyard.
For a good hour she rioted about the place in this way, working off her superfluous energy. By that time she had come to the stackyard. There, among the great stacks, she played hide-and-seek with the fairy-folk for a little.
The team behind them reared and snorted as the stallion sprang to its feet again. Then a strange and terrible thing happened. The horse stopped and made ready for the plunge he had in mind. There were warning cries from every man in the stackyard, but there was no chance to escape.
Word Of The Day