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Updated: June 8, 2025
By this time the usual closing hour had arrived, and after a benediction the faithful dispersed, each with about the ideas he brought to the meeting. Early next morning the good Deacon Barker, with his mind half full of the state of the unconverted, and half of his unfinished cow-shed, took his stick and hobbled about the village in search of a carpenter to finish the incomplete structure.
Peterkin thought it would be well to have a cow, to encourage the family to drink more, as he felt it would be so healthy. Mrs. Peterkin recalled the troubles of the last cold winter, and how near they came to starving, when they were shut up in a severe snow-storm, and the water-pipes burst, and the milk was frozen. If the cow-shed could open out of the wood-shed, such trouble might be prevented.
A motor-load of youthful "bloods," in a high state of conviviality, had made a temporary halt for repairs; the stoppage, however, did not extend to the vocal efforts of the party, and the watchers in the cow-shed were treated to a highly unauthorised rendering of "Good King Wenceslas," in which the adjective "good" appeared to be very carelessly applied.
Passing a cow-shed about this time, the squad halted to look with horror upon several dead and wounded Confederates who lay there upon the manure pile. They had suffered wounds and death upon this the last day of their country's struggle. Their wounds had received no attention, and those living were famished and burning with fever.
The washerwoman, coming to wash at three o'clock in the morning, had seen a dim shape moving slowly in the black shadow of the wall, made visible by a faint light from the setting moon. The ploughboy and Nathan, going out early to work, had heard low, rustling footsteps in the cow-shed as they opened the door.
'There's an old cow-shed in the field next to ours; let's shut him in and keep him there till after tea. He'll get a jolly row for being late when he gets back, and he won't dare to say where he's been; because I know it's against their rules to come anywhere near us, and Locker's Lane is out of bounds. If he does tell, we'll swear he was in the road chucking stones at the windows.
I thought, with a shudder, of babyhood thus surrounded, and how, in the long future, its first recollections of existence should be of booming guns and dying soldiers! The cow-shed contained seven corpses, scarcely yet cold, lying upon their backs, in a row, and fast losing all resemblance to man.
And then the tiled roof of cottage and homestead, of the long cow-shed where generations of the milky mothers have stood patiently, of the broad-shouldered barns where the old-fashioned flail once made resonant music, while the watch-dog barked at the timidly venturesome fowls making pecking raids on the outflying grain the roofs that have looked out from among the elms and walnut-trees, or beside the yearly group of hay and corn stacks, or below the square stone steeple, gathering their grey or ochre-tinted lichens and their olive-green mosses under all ministries, let us praise the sober harmonies they give to our landscape, helping to unite us pleasantly with the elder generations who tilled the soil for us before we were born, and paid heavier and heavier taxes, with much grumbling, but without that deepest root of corruption the self-indulgent despair which cuts down and consumes and never plants.
Betty joined in the laughter. "Are there many of of Us up here?" she asked. "There are as many as the village will hold, and every farm and byre and cow-shed for about six miles round," replied Mrs. Gascoigne, the new-comer. "And, of course, the little town, about four miles from here, near where the ships anchor, simply couldn't hold another wife if you tried to lever one in with a shoe-horn!"
So at last he had to bring it home and shut it up in the cow-shed and even that he found difficult.
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