ryllis standing by him; Bill Nye munching; Jearje
indolently rotating the churn with one hand, and feeding himself with
the other; Luce sitting down to her lunch in the kitchen; Iden lifting
his mug in the bow-window; Jack Duck with his great mouth full; eight
people--and four little children trotting down the road with baskets of
food.

"The lazy lot of people in this house; I never saw anything like it."

And that was the beauty of the place, the "Let us not trouble
ourselves;" "a handful in Peace and Quiet" is better than set banquets;
crumbs for everybody, and for the robin too; "God listens to those who
pray to him. Let us eat, and drink, and think of nothing;" believe me,
the plain plenty, and the rest, and peace, and sunshine of an old
farmhouse, there is nothing like it in this world!

"I never saw anything like it. Nothing done; nothing done; the morning
gone and nothing done; and the butter's not come yet!"

Homer is thought much of; now, his heroes are always eating. They eat
all through the Iliad, they eat at Patroclus' tomb; Ulysses eats a good
deal in the Odyssey: Jupiter eats. They only did at Coombe-Oaks as was
done on Olympus.

[Illustration]

[Illustration]

CHAPTER XXXIV.

AMARYLLIS went outside the court, and waited; Amadis rose and followed
her. "Come a little way into the Brook-Field," she said.

They left the apple-bloom behind them, and going down the gravel-path
passed the plum trees--the daffodils there were over now--by the
strawberry patch which Iden had planted under the parlour window; by the
great box-hedge where a thrush sat on her nest undisturbed, though
Amaryllis's dress brushed the branches; by the espalier apple, to the
little orchard-gate.

The parlour-window--there are no parlours now, except in old country
houses; there were parlours in the days of Queen Anne; in the modern
villas they have drawing-rooms.

The parlour-window hung over with pear-tree branches, planted beneath
with strawberry; white blossom above, white flower beneath; birds' nests
in the branches of the pear--that was Iden.

They opened the little orchard-gate which pushed heavily against the
tall meadow-grass growing between the bars. The path was almost
gone--grown out with grass, and as they moved they left a broad trail
behind them.

Bill Nye the mower, had he seen, would have muttered to himself; they
were trespassing on his mowing-grass, trampling it, and making it more
difficu