postman fought his way up there, with his packet of accumulated mail; for he knew that a warm welcome and a large reward awaited him. In the main, the long same 49 days went happily by. William and Brune had a score of resources for the season; the farm-servants worked in the barn; they were making and mending sacks for the wheat, and caps for the sheeps’ heads in fly-time, sharpening scythes and tools, doing the indoor work of a great farm, and mostly singing as they did it.

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As Aspatria sat in her room, surrounded by fine cambric and linen and that exquisite English thread-lace now gone out of fashion, she 50 could hear their laughter and their song, and she unconsciously set her stitches to its march and melody. The days were not long to her. So many dozens of garments to make with her own slight fingers! She had not a moment to waste, but the necessity was one of the sweetest delight. The solitude and secrecy of her labour added to its charm. She never took her sewing into the parlour. And yet she might have done so: William and Brune had a delicacy of affection for her which would have made them blind to her occupation and densely stupid as to its design.

As Aspatria sat

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So, although the days were mostly alike, they were not unhappily so; and at intervals destiny sent her the surprises she loved. One morning in the beginning of February, Aspatria felt that the postman ought to come; her heart presaged him. The day was clear and warm,—so much so, that the men working in the barn had all the windows open. They were singing in rousing tones the famous North Country 51 song to the barley-mow, and drinking it through all its verses, out of the jolly brown bowl, the nipperkin, the quarter-pint, the quart and the pottle,—the gallon and the anker,—the hogshead and the pipe,—the well, and the river, and the ocean,—and then rolling back the chorus, from ocean to the jolly brown bowl. Suddenly, while a dozen men were shouting in unison,—

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“Here’s a health to the barley mow!”

the verse was broken by the cry of “Here comes Ringham the postman!” Then Aspatria ran to the window and saw him climbing the fell. She did not like to go downstairs until Will called her; but she could not sew another stitch. And when at last the aching silence in her ears was filled by Will’s joyful “Come here, Aspatria! Here is such a parcel as never was,—from foreign parts too!” she hardly knew how her feet twinkled down the long 

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