advantage of me; yet everybody did so as soon as ever it
was known that my wits were gone moon-raking. For that was the way
they looked at it, not being able to comprehend the greatness and the
loftiness. Neither do I blame them much; for the wisest thing is to
laugh at people when we cannot understand them. I, for my part, took no
notice; but in my heart despised them as beings of a lesser nature, who
never had seen Lorna. Yet I was vexed, and rubbed myself, when John Fry
spread all over the farm, and even at the shoeing forge, that a mad dog
had come and bitten me, from the other side of Mallond.

This seems little to me now; and so it might to any one; but, at the
time, it worked me up to a fever of indignity. To make a mad dog of
Lorna, to compare all my imaginings (which were strange, I do assure
you--the faculty not being apt to work), to count the raising of my soul
no more than hydrophobia! All this acted on me so, that I gave John Fry
the soundest threshing that ever a sheaf of good corn deserved, or a
bundle of tares was blessed with. Afterwards he went home, too tired
to tell his wife the meaning of it; but it proved of service to both of
them, and an example for their children.

Now the climate of this country is--so far as I can make of it--to throw
no man into extremes; and if he throw himself so far, to pluck him
back by change of weather and the need of looking after things. Lest we
should be like the Southerns, for whom the sky does everything, and men
sit under a wall and watch both food and fruit come beckoning. Their sky
is a mother to them; but ours a good stepmother to us--fearing to
hurt by indulgence, and knowing that severity and change of mood are
wholesome.

The spring being now too forward, a check to it was needful; and in the
early part of March there came a change of weather. All the young growth
was arrested by a dry wind from the east, which made both face
and fingers burn when a man was doing ditching. The lilacs and the
woodbines, just crowding forth in little tufts, close kernelling their
blossom, were ruffled back, like a sleeve turned up, and nicked with
brown at the corners. In the hedges any man, unless his eyes were very
dull, could see the mischief doing. The russet of the young elm-bloom
was fain to be in its scale again; but having pushed forth, there must
be, and turn to a tawny colour. The hangers of the hazel, too, having
shed their dust to make the nuts, did not spread