hard work in house or garden. To her foster-child it was a labour of
love. In the early morning hours before milking time at the farm, or
in the grey of the twilight, Morva was free to work in her own garden,
while Sara only tended her herb bed. There at the further end was the
potato bed in purple flower, here were rows of broad beans, in which
the bees were humming, attracted by their sweet aroma that filled the
evening air; there was the leek bed waving its grey green blades, and
here, in the sunniest corner of all, was Sara's herb bed, which she
tended with special care, whose products were gathered at stated times
of the moon's age, not without serious thought and many consultations
of an old herbal, brown with age, which always rested with her Bible
and Williams "Pantycelyn's" hymns above the lintel of the door. For
nearly seventeen years this had been Morva's home, ever since the
memorable night of wind and storm which had wrecked the good ship
_Penelope_ on her voyage home from Australia. She had reached Milford
safely a week before, after a prosperous voyage, and having landed some
of her passengers, was making her further way towards Liverpool, her
final destination. It was late autumn, and suddenly a storm arose
which drove her out of her course, until on the Cardiganshire coast she
had become a total wreck. In the darkness and storm, where the foaming
waves leapt up to the black sky, the wild wind had battered her, and
the cruel waves had torn her asunder, and engulphed her in their
relentless depths; and when all was over, a few bubbles on the face of
the water, a few planks tossed about by the waves, were all the signs
left of the _Penelope_. The cottagers on the rugged coast never forgot
that stormy night, when the roofs were uplifted from the houses, when
gates were wrenched from their hinges, when the shrieking wind had torn
the frightened sheep from their fold, and carried them over hedges and
hillocks. There had never been such a storm in the memory of the
oldest inhabitant, and when in the foam and the spray, Stiven "Storrom"