Two or three old women alone stood in their
porches, with their sun-bonnets over their neat white caps, gossiping
as they knitted, and speaking an occasional word to an old, old man who
sat in a high-backed chair basking in the sun. The children were all
down in the meadow below, the little maids mostly sitting in the shade
and making nosegays of forget-me-nots; while every boy that could walk,
and some of the maids also, were paddling in the little stream or
dancing about the bank in chase of such unhappy fish as had been too
lazy to leave the shallows when the stream was turned into the
mill-leat. Sometimes they were silent, and the next moment they broke
into chorus like a pack of hounds, while occasionally there came a
shrill rate from one of the old women who watched them from the
cottages, calling back some too venturesome boy from the deep water of
the mill-leat.
So the old women gossiped and the children played, for the daily
coaches up and down had passed some hours before, and there was little
excitement to be looked for in the road after they were gone.
Presently the old women stopped and listened, for they heard the gate
at the lodge clang as it opened and shut, and two children's voices
crying merrily, "Oh, corporal, corporal, put on your watering-cap!"
Then one of the old women hastened, though with infirm steps, across
her little garden towards the road, and stood by the edge of it among
tall stalks of red valerian and a great plant of periwinkle which hung
down over the wall.
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