Please find herein a lockram shirt. If you wear it, they say
you’ll take no harm from the smallpox or other ills. I wove it
and made it of hemp, and said a good few old righteous charms
over it, but no unrighteous ones. I often call to mind the day
we watched the dragon-flies, at the time of the troubling of the
waters, when the lilies were in blow. So farewell for now, and
God send you happy.
Yours obediently,
PRUDENCE SARN.
The seventh of April being a very clear-coloured morning, I called the
weaving to mind, and so, as I went up and down the field sowing the
bright seed, I sang _Barley Bridge_.
“_Shift your feet in nimble flight,_
_You’ll be home by candlelight._
_Open the gate’s as wide as the sky,_
_And let the king come riding by._”
Would Kester ever come riding to Sarn from London Town? I wondered. For
the fair, he’d said he’d come, at the time of the troubling of the
waters, when the lilies were in blow all along the marges of the mere,
looking at their angels, and when blue kingfisher-flies and the bright,
lustre-coloured damsels were coming out of their shrouds.
I was thinking thus, when I looked up, and there was Tivvy, coming
running in a great courant, all distraught. “Come quick, Prue!” she
said. “Her’s took very bad. The tea didna agree. He says, give it her
strong, he says, for it’ll do more good the like of that’n. So I did.
And she said it was a bitter brew. But she drank it. And in a while she
went ever so quiet, and I couldna hear her breathe. And then she gave a
guggle and whispers—
“‘Go for Prue.’”
* * * * *
I was only just in time to kiss Mother, who was all shrunken down in her
pillows. She whispered—
“A bitter brew!” and smiled, and caught her breath, and was gone.