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Updated: July 12, 2025
Just now he would step around to boatbuilder Jago's and borrow or purchase a short length of eight-inch planking to repair the flooring of the bedroom cupboard. Jago had a plenty of such odd lengths to be had for the asking. "I'll make out the top of the water-butt wants mending," said Nicky-Nan to himself. "Lord! what foolishness folk talk about the contrivances of poverty.
It was shaped like a jug, so Dot took it down and washed it, saying to herself, "This will make a fine milk-jug." "A fine milk-jug?" yawned the miller from his flour-bag couch. "Ah, to be sure! children want milk to drink." And with this he threw on his clothes, and hastily washed himself in a water-butt which stood near the mill steps. Then he called to Dot.
How vividly I call to mind the damp about the house, the green cracked flagstones in the court, an old leaky water-butt, and the discoloured trunks of some of the grim trees, which seemed to have dripped more in the rain than other trees, and to have blown less in the sun! At one we dined, Mr. Mell and I, at the upper end of a long bare dining-room, full of deal tables, and smelling of fat.
Now alas, it was absolutely finished. Oh, dear no! "Gracious me," cried a brass manufacturer, "there's no handle on the door," and he put one on. An ironmonger added a scraper and an old lady ran up with a door-mat. Carpenters arrived with a water-butt, and the painters insisted on painting it. Finished at last!
A piece of furze, an old rag, and some black-looking stuff were found near the water-butt at the back, but what they could have to do with Johnson's disappearance no one could say. He was, however, manifestly gone, and Betty too, for neither of them made their appearance that day. The meeting was held, but no Thomas Johnson made his appearance at it, and his friends were lost in conjecture.
Cynthia cast a backward glance from the wagon as she spoke, and saw Reuben slowly and stiffly gathering up dry stalks in his garden, while Stephen propped up the declining side of a water-butt in his adjoining domain, one man's back carefully turned to the other. She walked back from the Centre, and stopped to talk with the twins in a casual manner.
"A man won't sweat half as much at that work," he added, with sarcastic significance. He went down accordingly with a light, and after a few moments' search came upon a miserable, half-famished wretch, who had squeezed himself in behind the water-butt.
It had long been known that the breeding-place of mosquitoes was in water; that their eggs when deposited in water floated upon the surface like tiny boats, usually glued together into a raft; that they then turned into larvæ, of which the well-known "wigglers" in the water-butt or the rain-barrel are familiar examples; and that they finally hatched into the complete insect and rose into the air.
On one side of the house was a water-butt, and I can well remember my first sad experience of the wickedness of the world when, getting up one morning to look after my rabbits and other live stock, I found that water-butt had gone, and that there were thieves in a village so rural and renowned for piety as ours. I say renowned, and not without reason.
He spent an hour looking for her, wandering in utter misery through the house and through the courtyard and stables and the kitchen garden. He looked for Jane in the hothouse and the cucumber frames, and under the rhubarb, and on the scullery roof, and in the water butt. It was just possible that on a day of complete calamity Jane should have slithered off the scullery roof into the water-butt.
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