through which the brook ran, Seth said suddenly, beginning to walk
faster, "Why, what's that sticking against the willow?"

They both ran forward, and dragged the tall, heavy body out of the
water; and then looked with mute awe at the glazed eyes--forgetting
everything but that their father lay dead before them.

Adam's mind rushed back over the past in a flood of relenting and pity.
Only a few hours ago, and the gray-haired father, of whom he had been
thinking with a sort of hardness as certain to live to be a thorn in his
side, was perhaps even then struggling with that watery death!


_II.--The Hall Farm_


It is a very fine old place of red brick, the Hall Farm--once the
residence of a country squire, and the Hall.

Plenty of life there, though this is the drowsiest time of the year,
just before hay-harvest; and it is the drowsiest time of the day, too,
for it is half-past three by Mrs. Poyser's handsome eight-day clock.

Mrs. Poyser, a good-looking woman, not more than eight-and-thirty, of
fair complexion and sandy hair, well shaped, light-footed, had just
taken up her knitting, and was seated with her niece, Dinah Morris.
Another motherless niece, Hetty Sorrel, a distractingly pretty girl of
seventeen, was busy in the adjoining dairy.

"You look the image o' your aunt Judith, Dinah, when you sit a-sewing,"