r the hinds were accounted brutish lumps that went
savage at night, like wild beasts, so that, if they spared the master's
throat, which was unlikely, it was certain that they would little spare
the salted meat, the dried fish, the mead, metheglin, and cyder that
their poor cellar afforded. The floor was of stamped clay, wet and
sweating but covered with rushes, so that the place had a mouldering
smell. Behind the heavy door there were huge bolts and crossbars against
robbers: the raftered ceiling was so low that it touched her hair when
she walked across the floor. The windows had no glass but were filled
with a thin reddish sheep-skin like parchment. Before the stairway was a
wicket gate to keep the dogs--of whom there were many, large and fierce,
to protect them alike from robbers and the hinds--to keep the dogs from
going into the upper room.

Each time that Mary Hall came into this home of hers her heart sank
lower; for each day the corner posts gave sideways a little more, the
cupboard bulged, the doors were loth to close or open. And more and more
the fields outside were inundated, the lands grew sour, the sheep would
not eat or died of the fluke.

'And surely,' she would cry out at times, 'God created me for other
guesswork than this!'

At nights she was afraid, and shivered at the thought of the fens and
the black and trackless worlds all round her; and the ravens croaked,
night-hawks screamed, the dog-foxes cried out, and the flames danced
over the swampy grounds. Her mirror was broken on the night that they
hanged her husband: she had never had another but the water in her
buckets, so that she could not tell whether she had much aged or whether
she were still brown-haired and pink-cheeked, and she had forgotten how
to laugh, and was sure that there were crow's-feet about her eyelids.

Her best gown was all damp and mouldy in the attic that was her bower.
She made it meet as best she could, and indeed she had had so little fat
living, sitting at the head of her table with a whip for unruly hinds
and louts before her--so little fat living that she could well get into
her wedding-gown of yellow cramosyn. She smoothed her hair back into her
cord hood that for so long had not come out of its press. She washed her
face in a bucket of water: that and the press and her bed with grey
woollen curtains were all the furnishing her room had. The straw of the
roof caught in her hood when she moved, and she heard her old