scaffold, "are you
coming down for a glass?" Three of the workmen came running down the
ladder as men with good "building legs" will do; but the others didn't
answer, except the joker (if he must so be called), who called out
without turning round: "Excuse me, neighbours for not getting down. I
must get on: my work is not superintending, like the gaffer's yonder;
but, you fellows, send us up a glass to drink the haymakers' health." Of
course, Philippa would not turn away from her beloved work; but the other
woman carver came; she turned out to be Philippa's daughter, but was a
tall strong girl, black-haired and gipsey-like of face and curiously
solemn of manner. The rest gathered round us and clinked glasses, and
the men on the scaffold turned about and drank to our healths; but the
busy little woman by the door would have none of it all, but only
shrugged her shoulders when her daughter came up to her and touched her.

So we shook hands and turned our backs on the Obstinate Refusers, went
down the slope to our boat, and before we had gone many steps heard the
full tune of tinkling trowels mingle with the humming of the bees and the
singing of the larks above the little plain of Basildon.

CHAPTER XXVII: THE UPPER WATERS

We set Walter ashore on the Berkshire side, amidst all the beauties of
Streatley, and so went our ways into what once would have been the deeper
country under the foot-hills of the White Horse; and though the contrast
between half-cocknified and wholly unsophisticated country existed no
longer, a feeling of exultation rose within me (as it used to do) at
sight of the familiar and still unchanged hills of the Berkshire range.

We stopped at Wallingford for our mid-day meal; of course, all signs of
squalor and poverty had disappeared from the streets of the ancient town,
and many ugly houses had been taken down and many pretty new ones built,
but I thought it curious, that the town still looked like the old place I
remembered so well; for indeed it looked like that ought to have looked.

At dinner we fell in with an old, but very bright and intelligent man,
who seemed in a country way to be another edition of old Hammond. He had
an extraordinary detailed knowledge of the ancient history of the country-
side from the time of Alfred to the days of the Parliamentary Wars, many
events of which, as you may know, were enacted round about Wallingford.
But, what was more interesting to us, he had