“Absence of occupation is not rest.”—_Cowper._
Jack went to bed with a kind of general idea of getting up in the
morning early and looking round the establishment. But, like the knight
who was to be at the postern gate at dawn, he failed to keep the
self-made engagement; and for the same reason he slept so soundly that
the sun was tolerably high when he awoke, and he had barely time for a
swim in the river, and a complete toilet, before the breakfast-bell
rang.
In spite of the baseless superstition that “there is nothing like one’s
own bed,” and so on, it is notorious that all men not confirmed
valetudinarians sleep far more satisfactorily away from home. For,
consider, one is comparatively freed from the dire demon,
Responsibility, you doze off tranquilly into the charmed realm of
dreamland—with “nothing on your mind.” Perfectly indifferent is it to
you, in the house of a congenial friend or affable stranger, whether
domestic disorganization of the most frightful nature is smouldering
insidiously or hurrying to a climax. The cook may be going next week,
the housemaid may have contracted a clandestine marriage. Your host may
be sternly revolving plans of retrenchment, and may have determined to
abandon light wines, and to limit his consumption to table-beer and
alcohol. But nothing of this is revealed to you; nor would it greatly
concern you if it was. For the limited term of your visit, the
hospitality is free, smooth, and spontaneous. Atra Cura, if she does
accidentally drop in by mistake, is a courteous _grande dame_, rather
plainly attired in genteel mourning, but perfect in manner. Not a
violent, unreserved shrew as she can be when quite “at home.” A visit is
in most instances, therefore, a respite and a truce. The parade, the
review, the skirmish are for a time impossible; so the “tired soldier”
enjoys the calm, unbroken repose in his own tent so rarely tasted.
The weather was hot, and there did not appear to be any likelihood of a
change. Nevertheless, Jack could not but acknowledge that no detail had
been omitted to insure the highest amount of comfort attainable in such
a climate. The butter was cooled, the coffee perfect, the eggs, the
honey, the inevitable chop, excellent of their kind. Everything bore
traces of that thorough supervision which is never found in a household
under male direction. Jack thought Miss Stangrove, charmingly neat and
fresh in her morning attire, would have added piquancy to a much more
homely meal.
“Just in time, Mr. Redgrave,” said that young lady; “we were uncertain
whether you were not accustomed to be aroused by a gong. Bells are very
old-fashioned, we know.”
“I doubt whether anything would have awakened me an hour since. I am a
reasonably early riser generally; but the ride and the extreme comfort
of my bedroom led to a little laziness. But where’s Stangrove?”
“I blush to say he went off early to count a flock of sheep,” said Miss
Stangrove, with assumed regret. “You must accustom yourself to our
aboriginal ways for a time. But is it not dreadful to think of? I hope
you extracted a total recantation from him last night.”
“We only made a commencement of the game last night,” said Jack. “Your
brother advanced a pawn or two, but we agreed to defer the grand attack
until after a ride round the run, which I believe takes place to-day.”
“I am afraid you will have a hot ride; but I don’t pity you for that.
Anything is better than staying indoors day after day, week after week,
as we wretched women have to do. You might tell Mark if he sees my horse
to have her brought in. I feel as if I should like a scamper. Oh! here
he comes to answer for himself. Well, Mark, how many killed, wounded,
and missing?”
“Good morning, Mr. Redgrave,” said Stangrove, smiling rather
lugubriously at his sister’s pleasantry. “I am afraid you are just in
time to remark on one of the weak points of my management. A shepherd
came before daylight to say that his flock had been lost since the day
before. I have been hunting for them these five hours.”
“And have you brought any home?” inquired Mrs. Stangrove.
“None at all,” he answered.
“Did you see any?” persisted the lady, who seemed rather of an anxious
disposition.
“Yes—ten.”
“And why didn’t you bring them?” pursued the chatelaine, whose
earnestness was in strong contrast with her sister’s nonchalance.
“Because they were dead,” replied Stangrove, laconically; “and now, my
dear, please to give me some tea. ‘Sufficient for the day’—and so on.”
“Accidents will happen,” interposed Jack, politely. “It is like more
important calamities and crimes, a matter of average.”
“Just so,” said Stangrove, gratefully; “and though I can’t help worrying
myself at a small loss, such as this, I know that the annual expense
from this cause varies very little.”
“There were wolves in Arcadia, were not there?” demanded the young lady.
“They ate a shepherd now and then, I suppose. If the dingoes would look
upon it in that light, what a joy it would be, eh?”
“I could cheerfully see them battening upon the carcase of that lazy
ruffian Strawler,” he very vengefully made answer.
“My love!” said Mrs. Stangrove, mildly, “the children will be in
directly—would you mind reading prayers directly you finish?”
“Well—ahem,” said the bereaved proprietor, rather doubtfully; “perhaps
you might as well read this morning, Mr. Redgrave and I have a long way
to go—what are you laughing at, Maud, you naughty girl?”
“Don’t forget to have old Mameluke got in for me, Mark, and to-morrow I
will go sheep-hunting with you myself, if little Bopeep continues
unsuccessful, and in an unchristian state of mind, unable to say his
prayers. I didn’t think the fencing question involved so high a moral
gain before.”
Breakfast over, two fresh hacks were brought up (Stangrove was a great
horse-breeder, and Jack’s eye had been offended as he rode up with
troops of mares and foals), and forth they fared for a day on the run,
and a contingent search for the lost flock.
Stangrove’s run was about the same size as Gondaree, but, save the
cottages and buildings of the homestead, there were no “improvements” of
any kind other than the shepherds’ huts. For stock, he had seventeen or
eighteen thousand sheep, a herd of cattle, and two or three hundred
horses. These last were within their boundaries in a general way, but
were occasionally outside of these merely moral frontiers. So also the
neighbouring stock wandered at will inside of the said imaginary
subdivisions.
“You see,” commenced Stangrove, in explanation, when they were fairly
out on the plain, “that I came into possession here some ten years past,
just after I had left school. My poor old governor, who was rather a
scientific literary character, lived at one of those small comfortable
estates near town, where a man can spend lots of money, but can’t by any
possibility make a shilling. Decent people, in those days, would as soon
have gone out to spend a few years with Livingstone as have come to live
permanently on the Warroo. We had a surly old overseer, of the old sort,
who managed a little and robbed a great deal. When I came here, after
the poor old governor died, you never saw such a place as it was.”
“I can partly imagine,” Jack said.
“Well, I worked hard, and lived like a black fellow for a few years, got
the property out of debt, improved the stock, and here we are. I get a
reasonable price for my wool, I sell a draft of cattle now and then, and
some horses, and am increasing the stock slowly, and putting by
something every year.”
“No doubt you are,” said Jack; “but here you have to live and keep your
wife and family in this out-of-the-way place; and at the present rate of
progress it may be years before you can make money or sell out
profitably. Why not concentrate all the work and self-denial into three
or four years—sell out, and enjoy life?”
“A tempting picture—but consider the risk. Debt always means danger; and
why should I incur that danger? At present I don’t owe a shilling, and
call no man master. As for happiness, I am not so miserable now (if I
could only find those sheep). I have a day’s work to do every day, or to
decline, if I see fit; and I would just as soon be here—a place endeared
to me by old association—as anywhere else.”
“But your family?” asked Jack, rather insincerely, as he was thinking of
Maud chiefly, and the stupendous sacrifice of _her_ life. “But,” he
said, “your children are growing up.”
“Yes, but only _growing_ up. By the time they need masters and better
schooling I shall be a little better off. Some change will probably take
place—stock will rise—or it will rain for two or three years without
stopping, as is periodically probable in New South Wales; and then I
shall sell, go back to the paternal acres in the county of Cumberland,
and grow prize shorthorns and gigantic cucumbers, and practise all the
devices by which an idle man cheats himself into the belief that he is
happy.”
“By which time you will have lost most of the zest for the choicer
pleasures of life.”
“Even so—but I am a great believer in the ‘in that state of life’
portion of the catechism. I was placed and appointed here, and hold
myself responsible for the safety and gradual increase of my ‘one
talent.’ Maud, too, has a share. I am compelled to be a stern guardian
in her interest.”
“Well,” returned Jack (after his companion had opened his mind, as men
often do in the bush to a chance acquaintance—so rare ofttimes is the
luxury of congeniality), “I am not sure that you are altogether wrong.
It squares with your temperament. Mine is altogether opposed to such
views. I think twenty years on the Warroo, with the certainty of a plum
and a baronetcy at the end, would kill me as surely as sunstroke. Isn’t
that sheep?”
As Jack propounded this grammatically doubtful query, he directed
Stangrove’s attention to a long light-coloured line at a distance. It
was soon evident that it was sheep coming towards them. To Stangrove’s
great relief, they proved to be the missing flock, in charge of one of
the volunteers sent out in all directions, if only they might perchance
manage to drop across them. Upon being counted they were only fifteen
short. Ten being accounted for by the domestic declaration of Mr.
Stangrove, the other five were left to take their chance, and the flock
sent back to a new shepherd, _vice_ Strawler superseded.
Stangrove brightened up considerably after this recovery of his
doubtfully-situated property. Byron asserts “a sullen son, a dog ill, a
favourite horse fallen lame just as he’s mounted,” to be “trifles in
themselves,” but adds, “and yet I’ve rarely seen the man they didn’t
vex.” So with lost sheep. You must lose a dozen or twenty—you hardly
lose more than fifty, say from ten to five-and-twenty pounds—not a sum
to turn the scale of ruin by any means. Yet, from the time that the
announcement is made of “sheep away” until they are safely counted and
yarded, rarely does the face of the proprietor relax its expression of
weighty resolve and grave foreboding.
Jack found by his companion’s avowal that at least one person besides
Bertie Tunstall held the same unprogressive but eminently safe opinions.
“Here’s a man,” said Jack, “with a worse climate, far less recreation
and variety than I had, and see how he sticks to his fight! However, I
_am_ differently constituted—there’s no denying it. If Stangrove’s
father had not been somewhat of the same kidney, he and I would have had
little chance of discussing our theories on the banks of the Warroo.”
“And so you won’t be tempted into fencing?” demanded Jack, returning to
the charge.
“Not just at present,” rejoined Stangrove. “I do not say but that if I
find myself surrounded by fencing neighbours, willing to share the
expense and so on, in a few more years I may give in. But I am a firm
believer in the Safe. I am now in a position of absolute security, and I
intend to continue in it.”
“But suppose bad seasons come?”
“Let them! I have no bills to meet. I can weather them again as I have
done before, when on this very station we had to boil down our meat to a
kind of soup; it was too poor to eat otherwise. We outlived that. Please
God, we shall do so again.”
“I suppose you had terrible losses?”
“You may say that; if another season came like it, the country would be
‘a valley of dry bones,’ literally. But even if I lost all my increase
for a year, and a proportion of my old stock, it would only shake me,
not break me. A man who is in debt it cooks altogether—that is the
difference.”
“Well, let us hope that such times won’t come again,” said Jack,
beginning to be unpleasantly affected by the idea of an interview with
Mr. Shrood, in which he should be compelled to inform him that the
season had been fatal to his whole crop of lambs, and the greater part
of his aged ewes. “Every one says the seasons have changed, and that the
climate is more moist than it used to be.”
“I am not so sure of that,” said his host, who was not prone to take
much heed of “what everybody said.” “I see no very precise data upon
which to found such an assertion. _What has been may be again._ We shall
have another dry season within the next five years, as sure as my name
is Mark Stangrove. What do you think of those horses? That is rather a
fancy mob. I see Maud’s horse Mameluke among them. We must run them in.”
“How do you reconcile it to your conscience to keep such unprofitable
wretches as horses?” inquired Jack, “eating the grass of sheep and
cattle, and being totally unsaleable themselves, unfit to eat, and
hardly worth boiling down.”
“I am grieved to appear so old-fashioned and ignorant,” said Mark, “but
I have a sentiment about these horses, and really they don’t pay so
badly. They are the direct descendants, now numbered by hundreds, of an
old family stud. They cost nothing in the way of labour; they need no
shepherd or stockman: they are simply branded up every year. You
couldn’t drive them off the run if you tried. And every now and then
there springs up a demand, and I clear a lot of them off. It is all
found money, and it tells up.”
“Meanwhile, the grass they eat would feed ten thousand sheep.”
“That is perfectly true; but of course I make no scruple of putting the
sheep on their favourite haunts when hard up. Horses, you see, can pick
up a living anywhere. Besides, I have always remarked that each of the
great divisions of stock has its turn once or twice in a decade, if not
oftener. You have only, therefore, to wait, and you get your ‘pull.’ My
next ‘pull’ with the stud will be when the Indian horse market has to be
supplied by us, as it must some day.”
“You seem a good hand at waiting,” said Jack. “I don’t know but that
your philosophy is sound. I can’t put faith in it however.”
“Everything comes to him who waits, as the French adage goes,” said
Stangrove. “I have always found it tolerably correct. However here we
are at home. So we’ll put this lot into the yard, and I’ll lead up the
old horse with a spare rein. We must have a ride out to Murdering Lake
tomorrow; it’s our show bit of scenery.”
“Another eventful day over, Mr. Redgrave,” said Maud, as they met at the
tea-table. “Yesterday the sheep were lost; to-day the sheep are found.
So passes our life on the Warroo.”
“You’re an ungrateful, naughty girl, Maud,” said Mrs. Stangrove. “Think
how relieved poor Mark must be after all his hard work and anxiety.
Suppose he had lost a hundred.”
“I feel tempted to wish sometimes that every one of the ineffably stupid
woolly creatures _were_ lost for good and all, if it would only lead to
our going ‘off the run’ and having to live somewhere else. Only I
suppose they are our living, besides working up into delaines and
merinos—so I ought not to despise them. But it’s the _life_ I
despise—shepherd, shearer, stockman—day after day, year after year.
These, with rare exceptions (here she made a mock respectful bow to
Jack), are the only people we see, or shall ever see, till we are gray.”
“You are rather intolerant of a country life, Miss Stangrove,” said
Jack. “I always thought that ladies had domestic duties and—and so
on—which filled up the vacuum, with a daily routine of small but
necessary employments.”
“Which means that we can sew all day, or mend stockings, weigh out
plums, currants, and sugar for the puddings—and that this, with a little
nursing sick children, pastry-making, gardening, and _very_ judicious
reading, ought to fill up our time, and make us peacefully happy.”
“And why should it not?” inquired Mark, looking earnestly at his sister,
as if the subject was an old one of debate between them. “How can a
woman be better employed than in the duties you sneer at?”
“Do you really suppose,” said Maud, leaning forward and looking straight
into his face with her lustrous eyes, in which the opaline gleam began
to glow and sparkle, “that women do not wish, like men, to see the
world, of which they have only dreamed—to mix a little change and
adventure with the skim-milk of their lives—before they calm down into
the stagnation of middle age or matrimony?”
“I won’t say what I suppose about women, Maud,” rejoined her brother.
“Some things I know about them, and some things I don’t know. But,
believe me, those women do best in the long run who neither thirst nor
long for pleasures not afforded to them by the circumstances of their
lives. If what they desire should come, well and good. If not, they act
a more womanly and Christian part in waiting with humility till the
alteration arrives.”
“What do you say, Mr. Redgrave?” asked the unconvinced damsel. “Is it
wrong for the caged bird to droop and pine, or ought it to turn a tiny
wheel and pull up a tiny pail of nothing contentedly all its days,
unmindful of the gay greenwood and the shady brook; or, if it beat its
breast against the wires, and lie dead when the captor comes with seed
and water, is it to be mourned over or cast forth in scorn?”
“’Pon my word,” answered Jack, helplessly, rather overawed by the strong
feeling and earnest manner of the girl, and much “demoralized” by those
wonderful eyes of hers, “I hardly feel able to decide. I’m a great lover
of adventure and change and all that kind of thing _myself_; can’t live
without it. But for ladies, somehow, I really—a—feel inclined to agree
with your brother. Sphere of home—and—all that, you know.”
“Sphere of humbug!” answered she, with all the sincerity of contempt in
her voice. “You men stick together in advocating all kinds of
intolerable dreariness and nonsensical treadmill work because you think
it good for women! You would be ashamed to apply such reasoning to
anything bearing on your own occupations. But I will not say another
word on the subject; it always raises my temper, and _that_ is not
permitted to our sex, I know. Did you see my dear old Mameluke to-day,
Mark?”
“Yes, and he’s now in the stable.”
“Oh, thanks; we must have a gallop to-morrow and show Mr. Redgrave our
solitary landscape. That will be one ripple on the Dead Sea.”
Life seemed capable of gayer aspects, even upon the Warroo, as next
morning three residents of that far region rode lightly along the
prairie trail. The day was cool and breezy; a great wind had come
roaring up from the south the evening before, crashing through the far
woods and audible in mighty tones for many a mile before it stirred the
streamers of the couba trees, as they all sat under the verandah in the
sultry night. Then the glorious coolness of the sea-breeze, almost the
savour of the salt sea-foam and of the dancing wavelets, smote upon
their revived senses. Hence, this day was cool, bracing, with a clear
sky and a sighing breeze. Jack was young, and extremely susceptible.
Maud Stangrove was a peerless horsewoman, and as she caused Mameluke, a
noble old fleabitten gray, descendant of Satellite, to plunge and
caracole, every movement of her supple figure, as she swayed easily to
each playful bound, completed the sum of his admiration and submission.
“Oh, what a day it is!” said she. “Why don’t we have such weather more
often? I feel like that boy in _Nick of the Woods_, when he jumps on his
horse to ride after the travellers whom the Indians are tracking, and
who shouts out a war-whoop from pure glee and high spirits. ‘Wagh! wagh!
wagh! wagh!’ Don’t you remember it, Mr. Redgrave?”
“Oh yes, quite well.” Jack had read nearly all the novels in the world,
and, if any good could have been done by a competitive examination in
light reading, would have come out senior wrangler. “_Nick of the Woods_
was very powerfully written—that is, it was a good book; so was the
_Hawks of Hawk Hollow_. Dick Bruce was the boy’s name.”
“Of course. I see you know all about him, and Big Tom Bruce is the one
that was shot, and didn’t tell them that he had a handful of slugs in
his breast till after the Indian town is taken, and then he falls down,
dying. Grand fellow, is not he? Nothing of that sort in our wretched
country, is there?”
“We had a little fighting at that Murdering Lake we are going to,” said
Mark. “Nothing very wonderful. But my horse was speared under me, and
_he_ remembered it for the rest of his life. Red Bob _was_ killed;
however, as he said before he died, it wasn’t ‘twenty to one, or
anything near it.’ He had shot scores of blacks, if his own and others’
tales were true.”
“And why were you engaged in your small war, Master Mark?” demanded
Maud. “It’s all very well to talk about Indians, and so on, but what had
these miserable natives done to you?”
“They were not so miserable in those days,” said her brother; “this
tribe was strong and numerous. I would have shirked it if possible; but
they speared a lot of the cattle and one of the men. We had to fight or
give them up the run.”
“The old story of Christianity and civilization? However I know _you_
would not have hurt a hair of their red-ochred locks if you could have
avoided it. Indeed, I wonder you kept your own scalp safe in those days.
The most simple savage might have circumvented you, I’m sure, you good,
easy-going, unsuspicious, conscientious old goose that you are.”
Here another expression, which Jack preferred much to those more
animated glances which opposition had called forth, came over her
features; as she gazed at her brother a soft light seemed gradually to
arise and overspread her whole countenance, till her eyes rested with an
expression of deep unconscious tenderness upon the bronzed, calm face of
Mark Stangrove. “I wonder if anything in the whole world could lead to
her looking at me like that?” thought Jack.
“This is the place. ‘Stand still, my steed,’” quoted Maud, as she reined
up Mameluke upon a pine-crested sand-hill, after a couple of hours’
riding. “There you can just see the water of the lake. Isn’t it a pretty
place? _The_ pretty place, I should say, as it is the only bit with the
slightest pretension upon the whole dusky green and glaring red patch of
desert which we call our run.”
It was, in its way, assuredly a pretty place. The waters were clear, and
had the hue of the undimmed azure, as they gently lapped against the
grassy banks. Around was a fringe of dwarf eucalypti, more spreading and
umbrageous than their congeners are apt to be. On the further side was a
low sand-hill with a thicker covering of shrubs. A drove of cattle were
feeding near; a troop of half-wild horses had dashed off at their
approach, and were rapidly receding in a long, swaying line in the
distance. A blue crane, the Australian heron, flew with a harsh cry from
the shallows, and sailed onward with stately flight.
“Oh for a falcon to throw off!” cried Maud, whose spirits seemed quite
irrepressible. “Why cannot I be a young lady of the feudal times, and
have a hawk, with silken jesses, and a page, and a castle, and all that?
Surely this _is_ the stupidest, most prosaic country in the world. One
would have thought that in a savage land like this they would have
devoted themselves to every kind of sport, whereas I firmly believe one
would have more chance of hunting, shooting, or fishing in Cheapside.
Why did I ever come here?” she pursued in a voice of mock lamentation.
“Because you were born here, you naughty girl,” said Mark; “are you not
ashamed to be always running down your native country? Don’t I see a
fire on the far point?”
They rode round the border of the lake, scaring the plover and the wild
fowl which swam or flew in large flocks in the shallows. When they
reached the spot where the small cape formed by the sand advanced boldly
into the waters of the lake at the eastern side, they observed that the
fire appertained to a small camp of blacks. Riding close up, the unmoved
countenance of “old man Jack” appeared with his two aged wives, while at
a little distance, superintending the boiling of certain fish, was the
girl Wildduck. She turned to them with an expression of unaffected
pleasure, and, rushing up to Miss Stangrove, greeted her with the most
demonstrative marks of affection. Suddenly beholding Redgrave, she
looked rather surprised; then, bestowing a searching look of inquiry
upon him, she made her usual half-shy, half-arch, salutation.
“So Wildduck is a _protégée_ of yours, Miss Stangrove,” said Jack; “I
had no idea she had such distinguished patronage.”
“Maud is a bit of a missionary in her way,” said Mark; “though perhaps
you might not think it. Many a good hour she has wasted over the runaway
scamp of a gin, and a little rascal of a black boy we had.”
“Poor things!” said Maud, with quite a different tone from her ordinary
badinage. “They have souls, and why should one not try to do them a
little good! I am very fond of this Wildduck, as she is called, though
Kalingeree is her real name. I remember her quite a little girl. Isn’t
she a pretty creature?—not like gins generally are.”
“She is wonderfully good-looking,” said Jack; “I thought so the first
time I saw her—when she was galloping after a lot of horses.”
“I am afraid her stock-keeping propensities have led her into bad
company,” said Maud; “and yet it is but a natural passion for the chase
in the nearest approach the bush affords. I can’t help feeling a deep
interest in her. You wouldn’t believe how clever she is.”
“She looks to me very much thinner than she used to be,” said Mark. “How
large her eyes seem, and so bright. I’m afraid she will die young, like
her mother.”
“She has been ill, I can see,” said Maud, as the girl coughed, and then
placed her hand upon her chest, with a gesture of pain. “What has been
the matter with you, Wildduck?”
“Got drunk, Miss Maudie; lie out in the rain,” said the girl, who was as
realistic as one of—let us say—Rhoda Broughton’s heroines.
“Oh, Wildduck!” said her instructress; “how _could_ you get tipsy again,
after all I said to you?”
“Tipsy!” said the child of nature, with a twinkle of wicked mirth in her
large bright eye—“tipsy! _me likum tipsy!_”
Mark and his guest were totally unable to retain their gravity at this
unexpected answer to Miss Stangrove’s appeal, though Jack composed his
countenance with great rapidity as he noticed a deeply-pained look in
Maud’s face, and something like a tear, as she hastily turned away.
“Are the old miamis there still, Wildduck?” asked Mark, by way of
turning the subject.
“Where you shoot black fellow, long ago?” asked she. “By gum, you
peppered ’em that one day. You kill ’em one—two—Misser Stangrove.”
“No, I think not, Wildduck. I fired my gun all about. Don’t think I
killed anybody. Black fellow spear Red Bob that day.”
“Aha!” said the girl, her face suddenly changing to an expression of
passion. “Serve him right, the murdering dog. He kill poor black fellows
for nothing; shoot gins, too, and picaninnies; ask old man Jack.”
Here she said a few words rapidly in her own language to the old man.
The effect was instantaneous. He sprang up—he seized his spear—his eyes
suddenly assumed a fixed and stony stare—with raised head he strode
forward with all the lightness and activity of youth. He muttered one
name repeatedly. Then his expression changed to one of horrible
exultation.
“I believe old man Jack was there,” said Mark. “Perhaps he threw the
spear that hit me.”
“Dono,” said Wildduck; “might ha’ been. He’d have done it quick if he
had, I know that.”
A spring cart with luncheon had been sent on at an early hour, and
commanded to camp close by the deserted miamis, which had never been
inhabited since the battle. Leaving their sable friends, with an
invitation to come up and receive the fragments, they rode over to the
spot indicated.
“Give me the hobbles,” said Mark to the lad who drove the spring cart.
“You can lay the cloth and set the lunch.”