her. With a faint, frightened cry she shrank back into the doorway of
the hen-house.

'Ye talk like a prophet. Ye sort o' skeer me.'

He laughed grimly, and paused, reflectively scanning her face. He seemed
about to continue in the same strain; but, instead, turned abruptly on
his heel, and strode away through the garden gate.


IV

For three hundred years there had been a Garstin at Hootsey: generation
after generation had tramped the grey stretch of upland, in the
spring-time scattering their flocks over the fell-sides, and, at the
'back-end', on dark, winter afternoons, driving them home again, down
the broad bridle-path that led over the 'raise'. They had been a race of
few words, 'keeping themselves to themselves', as the phrase goes;
beholden to no man, filled with a dogged, churlish pride--an upright,
old-fashioned race, stubborn, long-lived, rude in speech, slow of
resolve.

Anthony had never seen his father, who had died one night, upon the
fell-top, he and his shepherd, engulfed in the great snowstorm of 1849.
Folks had said that he was the only Garstin who had failed to make old
man's bones.

After his death, Jake Atkinson, from Ribblehead in Yorkshire, had come
to live at Hootsey. Jake was a fine farmer, a canny bargainer, and very
handy among the sheep, till he took to drink, and roystering every week