“What is it, my dear?” I asked her. “Is it the second sight?”
“No. I see nought. But I feel it within me.”
“You be well, be you, Mother?” I said, for I was afraid she might be
slipping from me, since the dying are ever so.
But she said, yes, she was in her daily health, and well, and not going
to die this many a day, only it came on her at the thought of Weaver,
and how he’d said—
“Well, single I am, and single shall stay, I do believe. But if ever I
did think of asking to wed, it ud be just such another as that’n.”
At the end of corn harvest Gideon asked me to write his second letter to
Jancis.
We were having our suppers on the bench under the dairy window. After, I
fetched the ink and said what should I write? So he said I must write
that he was well and hoped she was, and she was to be a good girl and
work hard and not ask for any early money for clo’es or boots, but think
of all that was to come, and it was a middling harvest, and her father
still in the same mind about the young squire, who was about coming back
from the Low Countries next year with his pockets full of money, and the
big longhorn cow had calved, but dropped her calf like the gwerian she
was, and to tell Mister Grimble he could do with a few lambs when he
fetched them off the hills for the winter, but no sign of fut-rot, or
home they’d come, dang-swang, and so no more from G. Sarn.
Then he said, “Put in as I’ll see her, Christmas market, if Grimbles ool
bring her.”
I said I’d do the best I could, and did it matter if I put in a bit
more? And I couldna help but laugh, for it did seem such a peculiar
letter for a fellow to write to his sweetheart. And Gideon looked up
very sharp and said, why did I want to write more? So I said the pen did
run away sometimes, and he said he supposed it wunna easy to know quite
what you were at when you started writing, and God save him from such
foolishness, and so long as I put in all he’d told me I might put in
some as well, if I’d a mind.
So I wrote it.
SARN.
_September Twenty-six._