You figure her, I hope, with her white bundle, a sort of erect black
ant, hurrying along the little white path-thread athwart the downland
slopes under the hot sun of the summer afternoon. On she struggled after
her resolute indefatigable nose, and the poppies in her bonnet quivered
perpetually and her spring-side boots grew whiter and whiter with the
downland dust. Flip-flap, flip-flap went her footfalls through the still
heat of the day, and persistently, incurably, her umbrella sought to
slip from under the elbow that retained it. The mouth wrinkle under her
nose was pursed to an extreme resolution, and ever and again she told
her umbrella to come up or gave her tightly clutched bundle a
vindictive jerk. And at times her lips mumbled with fragments of some
foreseen argument between herself and Skinner.

And far away, miles and miles away, a steeple and a hanger grew
insensibly out of the vague blue to mark more and more distinctly the
quiet corner where Cheasing Eyebright sheltered from the tumult of the
world, recking little or nothing of the Herakleophorbia concealed in
that white bundle that struggled so persistently towards its orderly
retirement.


VII.

So far as I can gather, the pullets came into Hickleybrow about three
o'clock in the afternoon. Their coming must have been a brisk affair,
though nobody was out in the street to see it. The violent bellowing of
little Skelmersdale seems to have been the first announcement of
anything out of the way. Miss Durgan of the Post Office was at the
window as usual, and saw the hen that had caught the unhappy child, in
violent flight up the street with its victim, closely pursued by two