s!' 'Ask quiet
then,' she says, 'or you'll get slops.' Since then they be all as mute as
mice."

Myra took Clem's hand, and the three hurried down the hill and through the
sleeping village to the ferry-slip, where Tom had a ship's boat ready.
In fifty strokes he brought her alongside the barque where the rafters--
twenty-five or thirty--were at work, busy as flies. The _Virtuous Lady_
had been towed up overnight from her first anchorage to a berth under Hall
gardens, and a hatch opened in her bows, through which the long balks of
timber were thrust by the stevedores at work in the hold and received by a
gang outside, who floated them off to be laid raftwise and lashed together
with chains. The sun, already working around to the south, gilded the
barque's top-gallant masts and yards, and flung a stream of gold along the
raft already finished and moored in midstream. But the great hull lay as
yet in the cool shadow of the hillside over which the larks sang.

Tom Trevarthen found the children a corner on the half-finished raft, out
of the way of the workmen, and a spare tarpaulin to keep their clothes
dry; and there they sat happily, the boy listening and Myra explaining,
until Mrs. Purchase, having slept her sleep and dressed herself (partly),
emerged on deck with a teapot to fill at the cook's galley, and, looking
over the bulwarks, caught sight of them.

"Hullo! You don't tell me that Susannah,"--this was the housekeeper at
Hall--"allows you abroad at this hour!"

Now the risk of Susannah's discovering their escape and pursuing was the
one bitter drop in the cup of these truants' happiness. Susannah--a
middle-aged, ill-favoured spinster, daughter of a yeoman-farmer, with
whose second wife she could not agree--scorned the sea and all sailors.
Once, as a girl, she had committed her ample person to a sailing boat,
and, thank God! that one lesson had been enough. Ships came and went
under the windows of Hall, but in the children's eyes they and their crews
belonged to an unknown world. Things real to them were the farm and farm
stock, harvests and harvest-homes, the waggoners' teams, byres, orchards,
garden, and cool dairy. Ships' captains arrived out of fairyland
sometimes, and crossed the straw-littered townplace to hold audience with
their grandfather; magic odours of hemp and pitch, magic chanty songs and
clanking of windlasses called to them up the hill; but until this morning
they had never dared to obey