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In the evening when the great logs of wood smoulder upon the enormous hearth and cast flickering shadows on the walls, revealing the cat slumbering in the ingle-nook, and the dog blinking on the rug when the farmer slowly smokes his long clay pipe with his jug of ale beside him, such an interior might furnish a good subject for a painter.
I did dwell, perhaps, with a fonder circumspection and more scrupulous niceness upon those early days, inasmuch as the things we have first known and suffered are always more vividly presented to our mind when we strive to recall 'em, sitting as old men in the ingle-nook, than are the events of complete manhood.
He loved the great ingle-nook, set deep back as it were, in the very bosom of the house, with its high and elaborately carved benches on each side, and its massive armorial emblems wrought in black oak, picked out with tarnished gold, crimson and azure, he appreciated every small gleam and narrow shaft of colour reflected by the strong sun through the deeply-tinted lozenge panes of glass that filled the lofty oriel windows on either side; and the stuffed knight-in- armour, a model figure 'clad in complete steel, of the fourteenth century, which stood, holding a spear in its gauntleted hand near the doorway leading to the various reception rooms, was almost a personal friend.
Presently they branched off the main road by a lane past a clump of beeches and drew up at the gate of a lonely house, built of very old red brick, and covered by Virginia creeper just turning a house with an ingle-nook and low, broad chimneys. Before it was a walled, neglected lawn, with poplars and one large walnut-tree.
The pigeons were just gathering to roost, and sunlight slanted on the dovecot, on their snowy feathers, and beyond in a shower on the top boughs of the woods. The click of billiard-balls came from the ingle-nook Jack Cardigan, no doubt; a faint rustling, too, from an eucalyptus-tree, startling Southerner in this old English garden.
But what it best pleases him to remember are the times when, seated in the ingle-nook, he used to listen to his grandmother telling fairy stories, as she sat at her black oak spinning-wheel, bending low over the whirling yarn. "Hommybeg" it was a pet name she had given to him "Hommybeg," she would say, "I will tell you of the fairies."
Attached to the ingle-nook is the oven, wherein bread is baked in the old-fashioned way, and the chimneys are large and carried up above the floor of the first storey, so as to form space for curing bacon.
Smoke was issuing from one of the chimneys, and it required no great imagination on the part of those three to visualize the kitchen at the other end of the chimney a broad, stone-flagged kitchen maybe, with a deep, old-fashioned ingle-nook, and pots and pans about it. "Phew! It makes a fellow's mouth water," declared Stuart, looking hungrily at the farm.
Auld Janet was established at the ingle-nook; Davie had turned the spit to his immortal honour; and even Ban and Buscar, in the liberality of Macwheeble's joy, had been stuffed to the throat with food, and now lay snoring on the floor.
"When warriors return, and one That went returns no more; When dusty is the road we run, And garners have no store; One ingle-nook right warm shall be Where my heart hath good company.
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