rew no fewer than three pailfuls of water for
the chickens' empty trough, and then while they were all crowding about
that, she undid the door of the run very softly. After which she became
extremely active, resumed her package, got over the hedge at the bottom
of the garden, crossed the rank meadows (in order to avoid the wasps'
nest) and toiled up the winding path towards Cheasing Eyebright.

She panted up the hill, and as she went she paused ever and again, to
rest her bundle and get her breath and stare back at the little cottage
beside the pine-wood below. And when at last, when she was near the crest
of the hill, she saw afar off three several wasps dropping heavily
westward, it helped her greatly on her way.

She soon got out of the open and in the high banked lane beyond (which
seemed a safer place to her), and so up by Hickleybrow Coombe to the
downs. There at the foot of the downs where a big tree gave an air of
shelter she rested for a space on a stile.

Then on again very resolutely....

You figure her, I hope, with her white bundle, a sort of erect black
ant, hurrying along the little white path-thread athwart the downland
slopes under the hot sun of the summer afternoon. On she struggled after
her resolute indefatigable nose, and the poppies in her bonnet quivered
perpetually and her spring-side boots grew whiter and whiter with the
downland dust. Flip-flap, flip-flap went her footfalls through the still
heat of the day, and persistently, incurably, her umbrella sought to
slip from under the elbow that retained it. The mouth wrinkle under her
nose was pursed to an extreme resolution, and ever and again she told
her umbrella to come up or gave her tightly clutched bundle a
vindictive jerk. And at times her lips mumbled with fragments of some
foreseen argument between herself and Skinner.

And far away, miles and miles away, a steeple and a hanger grew
insensibly out of the vague blue to mark more and more distinctly the
quiet corner where Cheasing Eyebright sheltered from the tumult of the
world, recking little or nothing of the Herakleophorbia concealed in
that white bundle that struggled so persistently towards its orderly
retirement.

VII.

So far as I can gather, the pullets came into Hickleybrow about three
o'clock in the afternoon. Their coming must have been a brisk affair,
though nobody was out in the street to see it. The violent bellowing of
little Skelmersdale seems to have been the fir