There was neither rhyme nor wit in the season; and up to St. Thomas's
eve, when it first started to freeze, the folk were thinking that
summer meant to run straight into spring. I mind the ash being in
leaf on Advent Sunday, and a crowd of martins skimming round the
church windows during sermon-time. Each morning brought blue sky,
warm mists, and a dew that hung on the brambles till ten o'clock.
The frogs were spawning in the pools; primroses were out by scores,
and monthly roses blooming still; and Master shot a goat-sucker on
the last day in November. All this puzzled the sheep, I suppose, and
gave them a notion that their time, too, was at hand. At any rate
the lambs fell early; and when they fell, it had turned to perishing
cold.
That Christmas-eve, while the singers were up at the house and the
fiddles going like mad, it was a dismal time for two of us. Laban
Pascoe, the hind, spent his night in the upper field where the sheep
lay, while I spent mine in the chall[1] looking after Dinah, our
Alderney, that had slipped her calf in the afternoon--being promised
the castling's skin for a Sunday waistcoat, if I took care of the
mother. Bating the cold air that came under the door, I kept pretty
cosy, what with the straw-bands round my legs and the warm breath of
the cows: for we kept five. There was no wind outside, but moonlight
and a still, frozen sky, like a sounding board: so that every note of
the music reached me, with the bleat of Laban's sheep far up the
hill, and the waves' wash on the beaches below.
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