from the looking-glass as she had left them. With a preoccupied
countenance, and with tears in her eyes, she got a pair of
scissors, and began mercilessly cutting off the long locks of her
hair, arranging and tying them with their points all one way, as
the barber had directed. Upon the pale scrubbed deal of the
coffin-stool table they stretched like waving and ropy weeds over
the washed gravel-bed of a clear stream.

She would not turn again to the little looking-glass, out of
humanity to herself, knowing what a deflowered visage would look
back at her, and almost break her heart; she dreaded it as much as
did her own ancestral goddess Sif the reflection in the pool after
the rape of her locks by Loke the malicious. She steadily stuck
to business, wrapped the hair in a parcel, and sealed it up, after
which she raked out the fire and went to bed, having first set up
an alarum made of a candle and piece of thread, with a stone
attached.

But such a reminder was unnecessary to-night. Having tossed till
about five o'clock, Marty heard the sparrows walking down their
long holes in the thatch above her sloping ceiling to their
orifice at the eaves; whereupon she also arose, and descended to
the ground-floor again.

It was still dark, but she began moving about the house in those
automatic initiatory acts and touches which represent among
housewives the installation of another day. While thus engaged
she heard the rumbling of Mr. Melbury's wagons, and knew that
there, too, the day's toil had begun.