-riding," "Wallflowers,
wallflowers, growing up so high," and "Poor Roger is dead and laid in
his grave." But in winter, or when the weather was bad, they made it
their custom to take their teas to Grannie's fireside and demand a story
as accompaniment to their frugal meal. The young voices of the children
brightened Grannie's life, and the hour of story-telling round the fire
was for her like a golden sunset following upon a day of gloom.

The stories which she told to the children were usually concerned with
her own childhood. She had always been of an imaginative turn of mind
and the doings of her early life, seen through the long-drawn vistas of
the years, had become suffused with iridescent colours. They had
gathered to themselves romance as a wall overhung by trees gathers to
itself moss and fern and lichen.

"Tell you a tale," she would say. "Ay, but, honey-barns, I reckon you'll
have heerd all my tales lang sin. No? Well then, did I iver tell you t'
tale o' Janet's Cove?"

"Ay, thou's telled us yon last week," Kester Laycock, the spokesman of
the party of listeners, would reply; "but thou mun tell it agean."

There was diplomacy as well as truth in Kester's words when he said that
Grannie had told them the story of Janet's Cove the preceding week. The
truth was that she had told them that tale every week since winter set
in, but nothing could stale its freshness for them. Besides, did not
Grannie introduce surprising variations of narrative every time she told
it, so that it never seemed quite the same story?

"Janet's Cove" was a story of the birds, and Grannie's knowledge of the
life and habits of birds seemed wonderful to them. Crippled with
rheumatism as she was, and unable to move from her bed, she nevertheless
watched for the return of the spring and autumn migrants with all the
eagerness of the born naturalist. She offered the children money if they
would bring her the first tidings of the arrival of birds in the dale.
There was always a halfpenny underneath the geranium pot in the
window-sill for the child whose eye caught sight of the first swallow,
redstart or sandpiper; or whose ear first recognised the clarion call of
the cuckoo, or the evening "bleat" of the nightjar on the
bracken-mantled fells at the end of May. Or, if the season were autumn,
the children were told to watch for the arrival of the woodcock and the
earliest flock of Norwegian fieldfares. Under Grannie's tuition more
than one ge