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Updated: June 1, 2025
The black rat peered under the lower rung of a gate into a straw-yard, and heard the rustlings of little folk field-vole, bank-vole, and wood-mouse who had gone before him.
Even when the stud-groom grumbled at the laming of a fine horse by injudicious bucketting up hill and down hill in a lively run with the Petersfield Harriers Sir Reginald made light of the injury, and sent Pepperbox into the straw-yard to recover at his leisure.
Dan was out. I had supper at the hotel, and rode slowly home. In the twilight stretches of the road, where I could touch either bank of the lane with my whip, I thought of nothing but Pasiance and her grandfather; there was something in the half light suited to wonder and uncertainty. It had fallen dark before I rode into the straw-yard.
At this point we left metalled roads and bucked vigorously amid ditches and under trees for twenty minutes. "Only cross-country car on the market," he said, as we wheeled into a straw-yard where a lone bull bellowed defiance to our growlings. "Open that gate, please. I hope the cattle-bridge will stand up."
"He bides in the gulley, sir; he has been there ever since the farm-house was burnt." Ere long Mr. Holworth was on his way to the gulley. What had been only a glade reaching from rock to stream, hidden in copsewood, was now an open space trodden by cattle, with the actual straw-yard more in the rear, but with a goat tethered on it and poultry running about.
"Well," he said slowly, "I don't know that I'm anything but an outsider now; but I'll go along with him, if he'll have me." He went downstairs. A few minutes later they rode out from the straw-yard. I watched them past the line of hayricks, into the blacker shadows of the pines, then the tramp of hoofs began to fail in the darkness, and at last died away.
"Therr they found 'en, zo to spake, dead in th' sun; but Ha-apgood can tell yu," and Hopgood, ever rolling his pipe, muttered something, and smiled his wooden smile. He came to see me off from the straw-yard. "'Tis like death to the varrm, zurr," he said, putting all the play of his vast shoulders into the buckling of my girths. "Mister Ford well!
The English boarding-school system is that of the straw-yard where colts are broken by routine, and again of the farmyard where pups are walked. Drill in school, laissez-faire out of it.
At the end of the season we either sold the horses off or turned them into a straw-yard, and I went to sea as ship's surgeon. In this capacity I made voyages to Australia, to the Cape, and to the West Indies; and the summer before I first saw Mr. Fortescue I had been to the Arctic Ocean in a whaler.
In the straw-yard he could see the dark shapes of cattle, broken by the pale sickles of their horns, like so many thin moons, fallen ends-up. He unlatched the farm gate stealthily. All was dark in the house. Muffling his footsteps, he gained the porch, and, blotted against one of the yew trees, looked up at Megan's window. It was open.
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