ying, fixed on mine; and dying, left
Krindlesyke and its gear to its new mistress.

EZRA:
A woman, she was. You've never had her hand
At farls and bannocks; and her singing-hinnies
Fair melted in the mouth--not sad and soggy
As yours are like to be. She'd no habnab
And hitty-missy ways; and she'd turn to,
At shearing-time, and clip with any man.
She never spared herself.

ELIZA:
And died at forty,
As white and worn as an old table-cloth,
Darned, washed, and ironed to a shred of cobweb,
Past mending; while your father was sixty-nine
Before he could finish himself, soak as he might.

EZRA:
Don't you abuse my father. A man, he was--
No fonder of his glass than a man should be.
Few like him now: I've not his guts, and Jim's
Just a lamb's head, gets half-cocked on a thimble,
And mortal, swilling an eggcupful; a gill
Would send him randy, reeling to the gallows.
Dad was the boy! Got through three bottles a day,
And never turned a hair, when his own master,
Before we'd to quit Rawridge, because the dandy
Had put himself outside of all his money--
Teeming it down his throat in liquid gold,
Swallowing stock and plenishing, gear and graith.
A bull-trout's gape and a salamander thrapple--
A man, and no mistake!

ELIZA:
A man; and so,
She died; and since your mother was carried out,
Hardly a woman's crossed the threshold, and none
Has slept the night at Krindlesyke. Forty-year,
With none but men! They've kept me at it; and now
Jim's bride's to take the work from my hands, and do
Things over that I've done over for forty-year,
Since I took them from your mother--things some woman's
Been doing at Krindlesyke since the first bride
Came home.

EZRA:
Three hundred years since the first herd
Cut peats for that hearth's kindling. Set alow,
Once and for all, it's seen a wheen lives burn
Black-out: and when we, too, lie in the house
That never knew housewarming, 'twill be glowing.
Ay! and some woman's tongue's been going it,
Like a wag-at-the-wa', in this steading, three hundred years,
Tick-tocking the same things over.

ELIZA:
Dare say, we'll manage:
A decent lass--though something in her eye,
I couldn't quite make out. Hardly Jim's sort ...
But, who can ever tell why women marry?
And Jim ...

EZRA:
Takes after me: and wenches buzz
Round a handsome lad, as wasps about a bunghole.

ELIZA:
Though now they only