out of mind, whenever a hoolet's screech
Sang through my blood; or poaching foxes barked
On a shiny night to the cackle of wild geese,
Travelling from sea to sea far overhead:
Or whenever, waking in the quiet dark,
The ghosts of horses whinneyed in my heart.
Ghosts! Nay, I've been the mare between the limmers
Who hears the hunters gallop gaily by;
Or, rather, the hunter, bogged in a quaking moss,
Fankit in sluthery strothers, belly-deep,
With the tune of the horn tally-hoing through her blood,
As the field sweeps out of sight.

MICHAEL:
Wildcats and hunters--
A mongrel breed, eh, Ruth?

BELL:
But, now it seems,
I can draw my hocks out of the clungy sump
I've floundered in so long; and, snuffing the wind,
Shew a clean pair of heels to Krindlesyke.
A mongrel breed, say you? And who but a man
Could have a wildcat-hunter making his bed
For him for fifteen-year, and never know it?
But, the old wife's satisfied, at last: she should be:
She's had my best years: I've grown old and grizzled,
And full of useless wisdom, in her service.
She's taught me much: for I've had time and to spare,
Brooding among these God-forsaken fells,
To turn life inside-out in my own mind;
And study every thread of it, warp and weft.
I'm far from the same woman who came here:
And I'll take up my old life with a difference,
Now she and you've got no more use for me:
You've squeezed me dry betwixt you.

MICHAEL:
Dry, do you say?
The Tyne's in spate; and we must swim for life,
Eh, Ruth? But, you'll soon get used ...

BELL:
She's done with me.
She'll not be sorry to lose me: I fancy, at times,
She felt she'd got more than she'd bargained for--
A wasp, rampaging in her spider's web.
"Far above rubies" has never been my line,
Though I could wag a tongue with Solomon,
Like the Queen of Sheba herself: I doubt if she
Rose in the night to give meat to her household.
She must have been an ancestor of mine:
For she'd traik any distance for a crack,
The gipsy-hearted ganwife that she was.

MICHAEL:
Wildcats and hunters and the Queen of Sheba--
A royal family, Ruth, you've married into!

BELL:
But now I can kick Eliza's shoes sky-high:
Nay--I must shuffle them quietly off; and lay
The old wife's shoes decently by the hearth,
As I found them when I came--a slattern stopgap--
Ready for the young wife to step i