seemed rather pleasant than otherwise to paddle about among the quiet
pools and on the cold bladder-wrack. But when the sky was leaden, and
the wind rolled with strange sounds down the chill hollows, it was
rather pitiful to see a barefooted woman tramping in those bitter
places. The sea seemed to wait for every fresh lash of the blast; and
when the grey water sprang into brief spurts of spray you felt how
cruelly Peggy's bare limbs were cut by the wind. But she took it all
kindly, and made no moan about anything. Towards eight o'clock you would
meet her tramping over the sand with her great creel full of bait slung
on her forehead. Her feet gripped at the sand, and her strong leg looked
ruddy and hard. Her hands were always rough, and covered with little
scratches received while she baited the lines; but these were no
miseries to Peggy, and her face always seemed composed and quiet. She
would not pass you without a word, and her voice was pleasant with low
gutturals. If her eyes reminded you of the sea, you put it down to a
natural fancy. They were not at all poetic or sentimental; for Peggy was
a rough woman. But something there was in the gleam of her pale clear
eyes that made you think of the far northern seas, by the borders of
which her forefathers in a remote time were probably born. As I have
said, Peggy could use very rough words when farmers' wives tired her
with too much chaffering; but mostly her face had a hard placidity that
refreshed the mind, just as it is refreshed by considering the
deliberate ways of harmless animals.

Towards eleven in the morning Peggy would be seated in her warm kitchen,
beside a flat basket in which mysterious coils of brown twine wound
round and round. The brown twine had tied to it long lines of horse-hair
snoods with sharp white hooks lashed on by slips of waxed thread. Peggy
baited one after another of these hooks and laid them dexterously so
that the line might be shot overboard without entanglement. You might
sit down in the sanded kitchen to talk to the good woman if you were not
nice about fishy odours. If you led on to such subjects, she would bring
out her store of ghostly stories: how a dead lady walked in the
shrubberies by the tower after the squire's sons murdered her lover; and
how the old clock in the tower had a queer light travelling over its
face on one day of the year. Or she would gossip about the folks in the
place; telling you how poor Jemmy had lost money, a