playing in the evenings before the officers'
dinner-tent. And sometimes they would play Sunday afternoons too; and
Parson were terrible put about, and wrote to the Colonel to say as how
the music took the folk away from church, and likened it to the worship
of the golden calf, when `the people sat down to eat and drink, and rose
up again to play.' But Colonel never took no notice of it, and when
'twas a fine evening there was a mort of people trapesing over the
Downs, and some poor lasses wished afterwards they'd never heard no
music sweeter than the clar'net and bassoon up in the gallery of
Wydcombe Church.

"Sophia was there, too, a good few times, walking round first on her
husband's arm, and afterwards on other people's; and some of the boys
said they had seen her sitting with a redcoat up among the
juniper-bushes. 'Twas Michaelmas Eve before they moved the camp, and
'twas a sorry goose was eat that Michaelmas Day at Wydcombe Farm; for
when the soldiers went, Sophia went too, and left Michael and the farm
and the children, and never said good-bye to anyone, not even to the
baby in the cot. 'Twas said she ran off with a sergeant, but no one
rightly knew; and if Farmer Joliffe made any search and found out, he
never told a soul; and she never come back to Wydcombe.

"She never come back to Wydcombe," he said under his breath, with
something that sounded like a sigh. Perhaps the long-forgotten break-up
of Farmer Joliffe's home had touched him, but perhaps he was only
thinking of his own loss, for he went on: "Ay, many's the time she would
give a poor fellow an ounce of baccy, and many's the pound of tea she
sent to a labourer's cottage. If she bought herself fine clothes, she'd
give away the old ones; my missis has a fur tippet yet that her mother
got from Sophy Joliffe. She was free with her money, whatever else she
mid have been. There wasn't a labourer on the farm but what had a good
word for her; there wasn't one was glad to see her back turned.

"Poor Michael took on dreadful at the first, though he wasn't the man to
say much. He wore his yellow breeches and blue waistcoat just the same,
but lost heart for business, and didn't go to market so reg'lar as he
should. Only he seemed to stick closer by the children--by Martin that
never know'd his father, and little Phemie that never know'd her mother.
Sophy never come back to visit 'em by what I could learn; but once I
seed her myself twenty years later, w