The shabby little cart with the legend of “Daniel Quarles,” and the smart dog-cart of Farmer Gale, rolled side by side of a Monday morning in the restored June sunshine towards the Chipstone cattle-market. Jinny had timed this coincidence, and meant to extract the farmer’s opinion of the horses for sale. She had already gleaned from her grandfather what particular teeth were chronological, but such confidence as she possessed in her own “horse-sense” had been rudely dissipated by a volume on the noble animal, which she had unearthed in Mother Gander’s sanctum. The lists of diseases and defects from which it might suffer was paralysing, and even when it was a thing she had heard of—like grogginess—it grew more sinister by being called “navicular disease.” Methusalem’s maladies had been simple enough, and she had dared to drench or anoint him with divers remedies. But now that knowledge had dissipated the bliss of ignorance—now that warts had enlarged into “angleberries,” rheumatism had darkened into “felon,” and farcy, quittor, Ascaris megalocephala, and countless other evils were seen hovering around Methusalem, thick as summer gnats, she marvelled how he had staved them off. That poor Methusalem! An affectionate animal by nature was the horse,—the book told her—he wanted to please man, only sometimes he was in agony and the flesh could not obey. Good heavens, what if sometimes when she was in a hurry to get home, she had wronged Methusalem, even in her thoughts! Remorsefully, and with a new and morbid anxiety, she caressed his delicate, nose, amazed at her ancient, easy assurance of his immortality. It even shook her faith in the all-sufficiency of the Spelling-Book that it contained no intimation of the ills that horseflesh is heir to.

And the animal she had now to buy for Mr. Flippance might be affected with all or any of these ills, and even if one could detect such obvious defects as windgalls, spavin, thorough-pin, or broken wind, how avoid a crib-biter or a wind-sucker, how grapple with the bot-fly, two hundred of which could hook themselves horribly to a single equine stomach, or with the still more formidable Palisade Worm, which even its name of Strongylus armatus could scarcely worsen, a thousand of it having been counted by a patient authority on a surface of two inches, and its census taken at a million for a single horse!

Farmer Gale, however, failed to throw much light on these alarming questions, which he did not know, indeed, were being asked. His conversation kept gliding away to his grievances, for it consisted, like that of most farmers, of grumbles. Usually these started from the little string-tied sample bags of threshed grain he carried in his pocket to be blown and tasted by hard-bargaining customers. But to-day, though he was not bound for the corn-market, he was nevertheless not to be baulked of his grievances. They were not, this time, against Nature, but against Man; for, as the fields they passed showed, the corn was particularly forward. It was not Providence that had run down wheat to thirty shillings a quarter. Free Trade was in reality the ruin of free Britain. For the labour of Continental slaves, who went with the soil, and were sold with it like cattle, who subsisted on black bread, skim-milk, and onions, was brought into competition with that of the freeborn Briton, who must thus be dragged down to the same level.

The bluff, freeborn Briton was Farmer Gale’s favourite rÔle, and his ruddy face, grey bowler, and smart gaiters made him sympathetic enough superficially, while the potent landowner’s consideration for Jinny’s religious necessities had not failed to evoke a flattered gratitude in her humble breast when they drove together of a Sunday to their respective chapels. This amiable image of himself the breezy Briton was now destined to shatter. For after some critical comment on the ploughing of the fields they passed and the activities of the poachers—he would certainly have to get rid of that suspicious character, “Uncle Lilliwhyte,” who occupied a cottage badly needed for a farm-hand—he pointed out the impossibility of building another cottage as Jinny had so crudely suggested. Prices were simply ruinous.

“I tell my labourers as man to man,” he said emphatically, “that they can’t have regular employment and their present wages. Take your choice, boys, says I. Look at other countries, do they get more than their six or seven shillings a week? No! Then that’s what you’ll have to come down to.”

“But how can they live on it?” asked Jinny.

“How can farmers live?” he retorted. “We must go by the price of corn.”

“But did you go by the price of corn after the Battle of Waterloo?” asked Jinny shrewdly. “For I remember Gran’fer once telling me you got—I mean your father got—a hundred shillings a quarter then, yet folks were so starved they went burning the ricks.”

“I was only a baby then. I can’t say what happened.”

“But the same thing happened nearer our time,” she reminded him, thinking of the Bidlake tragedy.

“Oh, that silly rioting and machine-smashing. That always came out of the poor not understanding politics. If things were bad after Waterloo, it was all Bony’s work. And as for the unrest twenty years ago, we caught that from France, too, I remember dad telling me. They had risen against their king—such an unsettled people. But to-day it’s our own British Government that’s the enemy, and the money we farmers have lost this year is something dreadful.”

“But you don’t look as starved as some of our labourers’ families. I’ve seen the Pennymole children crying for dry bread, and the father saying, ‘I darsn’t cut you no more—do, ye’ll have none Saturday.’ And Mr. Pennymole’s always worked for you.”

“You don’t understand politics, Jinny.”

“I understand poverty. The Pennymoles are better off, now they’ve got two boys grown up and earning sixpence a day. But I’ve seen Mrs. Pennymole making tea with charred bread, and her husband compelled to steal the cabbages left for the cows.... Oh, I oughtn’t to have said that,” she added in alarm.

“You certainly oughtn’t! Compelled to break the Eighth Commandment—a pretty doctrine! And such liars, too. I saw quite a little girl munching a turnip she’d just filched from my field, and when I complained to her mother, the woman unblushingly said, ‘’Tis me fats her up with swedes and turnips.’”

“They can’t see their children hunger.”

“They can put some of them in the poorhouse.”

“Look at the mites there, white and half-starved. Sometimes I’ve got to deliver a parcel to Mr. Jims, the porter, and I hear the Master thrashing ’em with a stick.”

“And it’s what boys need—even my brat. Carrying parcels, indeed!” He stopped abruptly.

“Well, but they make the old folks of eighty and ninety scour the stone steps and do the washing!”

“They needn’t go in—they can get relief from the parish.”

“The parish! Eighteenpence a week for the family when the father’s bedridden.”

“There’s the parish loaves!”

“Have you ever seen one? Half-baked, without real crust, all raw and soft, where it stuck to the next loaf.”

“Beggars can’t be choosers. Besides, there’s plenty of work after harvest.”

“Yes, even for babies of six,” said Jinny bitterly. “And to keep boys from their beds after hard field-work. And at White Notley where they make the silk, there’s little girls standing on stools to reach the weaving-desk.”

“If you understood politics,” Farmer Gale persisted, “you’d understand that prices make themselves, and that what we get with one hand we have to give away with the other. Have you ever heard of the Income Tax now?”

“No,” admitted Jinny.

“Ha! You’d change your tune if you had to pay a shilling on every pound you earned. But that’s merely the last straw that breaks the camel’s back, for it isn’t only as a farmer I’m put upon. But think of the Malt Tax! It’s simply a scandal.”

“Is it? I should have thought ’twas six shillings a week would be the scandal.” Her eyes and cheeks blazed prettily, and she was beginning to shelve the idea of consulting her companion at the horse-market.

“I don’t say you’re altogether wrong,” conceded Farmer Gale, admiring, despite himself, her fire and sparkle. “But it’s the Government that’s responsible. There was a great old meeting t’other day at Drury Lane Theatre in London. Two thousand people, if a man. The Duke of Richmond he up and said by Heaven we’ve got to have Protection, and we will have it. Oh, it was a grand speech. I went up for it express. And we’ve had a meeting of farmers down here, too, and we’re going to wake up the country, we Essex chaps.”

“Are you?” said Jinny, secretly amused at this “furriner’s” complacent identification of himself with her county.

“You wait! We’re going to come out with a Proclamation.”

“But that’s a Royal thing,” said Jinny.

“Not always: besides we shall end with God save the Queen. Yes, that’s it: ‘Down with the Malt Tax and God save the Queen!’ And the beginning: ‘To our worthy labourers, greeting.’ I’ll draw that up soon as I get home.”

“I should offer ’em ten shillings a week,” said Jinny.

“You’re joking!”

“I’m dead earnest. A family can’t live under ten shillings a week. Then they wouldn’t want to shoot your rabbits and steal your turnips and cabbages.”

“Prices make themselves, I tell you. Folks can’t have more than they’re worth. Why, my dad paid as much as thirteen shillings a week to our old looker, Flynt, when he had his strength. Yes, though nobody ever suspected he got more than twelve.”

“But besides his duties as bailiff he had to see after feeding the stock night and morning, including Sundays.”

“That was why my father paid him the extra shilling. And you can’t say I haven’t treated him generously over the farmhouse.”

“I wonder he could bring up such a large family so genteelly,” mused Jinny at a tangent.

“The more the easier. A brat of four can scare the crows: the only pity is that his boys wouldn’t stay on the land.”

“What was there to stay for? I think there ought to be a law that nobody gets under ten shillings,” persisted Jinny.

“What a blessing we haven’t got women over us,” said the farmer, smiling at a heresy too unreasonable for argument. “Men Governments are bad enough, but women would drive us to the workhouse.”

“And what about the Queen?” asked Jinny.

“Well, what about the Queen?” he repeated vaguely.

“Isn’t the Queen a woman?”

“The Queen a woman!” He was dazed. “But she doesn’t really govern—not nowadays. It’s Lord John!”

“Well then, what about Queen Elizabeth?”

“Ah, that was some time back,” he said evasively.

“Yes, she put on the crown in 1558, November 17,” quoted Jinny from that Spelling-Book.

“I didn’t know you were so well up in history,” he said admiringly. “I reckon you’re ready at ciphering too?”

“How could I do my work without it?”

“Ah, that’s true. And a good hand at a pen, I suppose?”

“I can scratch what I want.”

“Ah!”

He fell silent.

“You don’t play the piano?” he asked after a pause.

“No,” said Jinny. “Only the horn.” And she blew gaily upon it: whereupon to her surprise and satisfaction—for she had forgotten him, and it was necessary to tie him up against the sheep—Nip appeared, tearing from the rear. Farmer Gale watched musingly the operation of confining him to his basket by one of those pieces of hoop-borne rope that had excited the speculation of Mr. Elijah Skindle.

“I suppose you could play a polka on it,” he remarked.

Jinny obliged with a few bars of the “Buy a Broom.”

“If you had a piano,” he observed with growing admiration, “I expect you’d soon learn to play it on that.”

Jinny shook her head. “I shall never have the time. There’s the goats, and the garden, and Gran’fer, and Methusalem——”

“Nearly all g’s,” laughed Farmer Gale, exhilarated by his own erudition.

“And isn’t Methusalem a gee?” flashed Jinny, and exhilarated him further by her prodigious wit.

They were both smiling broadly as, just outside the market, they came upon Will leaning against a lime-tree, a pipe between his teeth and a darkness palpable on his forehead despite its “ginger” aureola.

Jinny’s smile died and her heart thumped. Instantaneously she decided that as the farmer had seen them together at “The Black Sheep,” to ignore Will absolutely would be to betray their quarrel to the world.

“Fine morning!” she cried as the vehicles passed. Will sullenly touched his hat.

He was amazed that the Cornish potentate should countenance her presence, so incongruous amid this orgie of untempered masculinity, this medley of unpetticoated humanity of every rank and class, of which drovers twirling branches or leaning on sticks formed the ground pattern: small farmers rubbing shoulders with smart-gaitered gentry in frilled shirts; blue-aproned butchers with scissors at breast jostling peasants in grimy smock-frocks and squash hats or ruddy, whiskered old squires and great grazier farmers in blue, gilt-buttoned coats, white flap buff waistcoats, and white pot or broad-brimmed hats; still more elegant town types in glossy, straight-brimmed cylinders and double-breasted, green frock-coats galling the kibes of bucolic, venerable-bearded ancients in fusty sleeved waistcoats and greasy high-hats, who blew their noses with black fingers. It was a fantasia of pipes and caps, of immaculate collars and dirty scarves, of broadcloth cutaways and filthy Cardigan jackets, of top-booted buckskins and corduroy trousers tied with string below the knee. As Jinny and Farmer Gale alighted, and mingled with this grotesque mob swirling around the pens in the sunshine, Will’s heart was hot with resentment against the girl who, while rejecting the counsel and co-operation of her old friend in the great horse-deal, had brazenly accepted the guidance of a bumptious “furriner.” How shamelessly she walked amid that babel of moos, baas, grunts, shouts, and bell-ringing, as if here was her natural place. Really, to see smoke puffing publicly out of her mouth, as it had puffed privately out of that Polly’s, would hardly be surprising now. And the men were looking after her, there could be no doubt of that, appraising her as if she, too, was in the market. He could not but feel a faint relief that she was under substantial masculine escort, however abhorred.

The market-place, along which our quite unconscious Jinny was now making so indiscreet a tourney, was constructed outside the town proper, bordered on two sides by lime-trees and open to the sky save in the auction-room and bar, where walls and roofing gave a grateful shade, though the company in either did not contribute coolness. The cattle were shuffling about restlessly, jostling, mounting. The store calves and bullocks lay in pens; the fatted calves had already been sold: pathetic plumpnesses about to be butchered. Butchers, indeed, were already emerging from the auction-room leading struggling strap-muzzled calves by head-ropes, and holding on—for extra precaution—to their tails.

“Poor creatures!” said Jinny, with tears coming to her eyes.

“Yes, a poor lot!” assented Farmer Gale, and if Will could have felt the flash of scorn that went through Jinny’s heart, he would have scowled less. There was a store calf, stamped in blue, so tiny that Jinny longed to mother it. Here again the farmer blundered: he doubted if anybody would buy it; at least it would be killed instanter to be mixed with pork for sausages.

He was a widower, Jinny remembered, and the line in the Spelling-Book defining that word floated suddenly before her illumined mind: “Widower—One who has buried his wife.” There had always seemed to her something superfluously sinister in that definition—as if the husband had personally put his wife out of the way, or at least made sure she was disposed of. Was a man a widower whose wife had been burnt up, she had wondered whimsically. Or if Miss Gentry had been married and gone to sea and been duly drowned, would her husband have been free to remarry? But for Farmer Gale at least, how pat was the definition, she felt. He assuredly suggested the wilful widower: this man without entrails of mercy, whether for the poor or for beasts.

She moved away silently, trying to lose him, looking for the horses. She passed pens of sheep, and dogs (only a few of these, and tied), and cows with swollen, oozy udders. There was a sheep nibbling at a fallen lime branch outside its pen, and another shoving hard to displace him. Jinny picked it up and gave it to this covetous creature, who sniffed and then turned away. There seemed to be a sort of Spelling-Book moral in it. Before the pigs (red-crossed and blue-marked) she found Master Peartree in rapt contemplation.

“The pegs be lookin’ thrifty and prosperous,” he observed, in response to her asking how he found himself. “They don’t need no auctioneer’s gammon.”

“No pig does,” punned Jinny.

“Ah, here we are!” said a less welcome voice—Jinny maliciously referred Farmer Gale’s “we” to his juxtaposition with the pigs. The uneasy capping and ducking of the shepherd-cowman before his master, and his moving off towards his own animals, suggested that pigs were a private passion with Master Peartree. But he had brought up the memory of the shearing-shed, and with it the renewed thought of Will, and it was a tenderer thought than for the potentate at her side. Will might be stubborn and silly, but never, surely, would he deny that no family should have less than ten shillings a week: she felt relieved she had broken the ice between them, even though “Fine morning” was only a little hole in it.

As if echoing her thoughts, “Fine morning!” said the pig-auctioneer to Farmer Gale. It was a special mark of attention from this gentlemanly-looking man, elevated on a massive stool, who wore gaiters and a great gleaming signet-ring that showed as he turned the pages of a written catalogue. This was kept by elastic strings in a grand calf cover, though pigskin would have seemed more in keeping. Two acolytes, standing on the ground, scribbled in their lowliness. Buyers sat on the rim of the pens, with their feet dangling over the pigs, and the pig-drovers hovered near, in their long high aprons of coarse brown sacking.

Soon Farmer Gale became as fascinated as Master Peartree, for the pigs did indeed look “thrifty and prosperous,” and as the penful was on the point of falling to a low bid, he nipped in and secured a bargain. While he was complacently cutting away bristles, signing his acquisition with his scissors, Jinny stole away, feeling he was safely penned.