The Cuckoo Tree Read Online Free PDF Page B

Tegleaze said you'd help me."
    "Owd Tom Firkin I be, and this yer's my dog Toby."
    "What kind of a dog's that? I've never seen one like him before."
    Toby was a grayish sandy color, as big as a sheep, and so extremely shaggy that it was hard to tell which way he was facing.
    "Old-fashioned ship dog ee be," Mr. Firkin said.
    "Old-fashioned! He looks like something out o' the ark."
    "Ah, he be a wunnerful clever dog wi' the ship; we ne'er loses one at lambing time."
    While he was speaking Mr. Firkin continued on his way and Dido followed into a cowshed where a brindled cow stood waiting to be milked. Mr. Firkin hung his yoke over a wooden partition, took off the buckets, and sat down to milk on a three-legged wooden stool like the one in the
loft, leaning his head against the cow's side. He wore a battered hard felt hat, painted gray, with a pheasant's feather in it, and a sort of jerkin and apron made of sacking over velveteen breeches and leather boots. He had a long bushy white beard, which at the moment was inconveniencing him very much; it stuck out and got in the way of the milk flow and if he pushed it to one side with his elbow it dangled into the pail.
    "You want a bit o' string for that, mister," said Dido. She had one in her pocket, with which she tied the beard, doubled up in a neat bunch.
    "Nay! That's nim," he said admiringly. "I can tell ee must be a trig liddle maid. Why don't ee feed my chickens while I tend to owd Clover here, then us'll git our breakfasses."
    He showed her where the hens were shut up at night "for fear o' foxy owd Mus' Reynolds" and gave her a round tin pan with a wooden handle.
    "Chickens' grub be in the posnet yonder."
    Outside the cottage at the far end of the row from Mrs. Lubbage's, Dido saw a kind of caldron on legs, which proved to be full of potato peelings. Under Mr. Firkin's directions, she mixed these with a measure of corn. Then she opened the fowl-house door, letting loose a knee-deep flood of brown, white, and speckled poultry into the yard, and fed them by flinging out handfuls of the mixture until they were all busily pecking and the pan was empty. Meanwhile Mr. Firkin had finished milking and carried the two full pails back to his cottage.
    Dido followed and found him there carefully wringing
his beard into one of the pails.
    "Now then, what's all this nabble about ol' Lady Tegleaze?" he said, putting a pan of water to boil over the fire. While he cut slices off a loaf and a side of bacon and laid them in a skillet, Dido told him about the accident: how Captain Hughes, wounded in the Chinese wars, had been coming home on sick leave, when his ship the
Thrush
had become involved in another battle, against the French this time, and had captured a French frigate.
    "And we was taking a Dispatch to London about it all when this roust-up had to happen."
    Mr. Firkin was deeply interested in her tale.
    "Yon sick Cap'n's lying with a busted leg in the empty cottage? Eh, I'll take him a posset; that'll furbish him up."
    He poured milk into another pan (not from the pail into which he had wrung his beard, Dido was relieved to notice), warmed it, added sugar, eggs, and a golden fluid from a leather bottle.
    "What's yon, mister?"
    "Dandelion wine, darter."
    The posset was yellow and frothy and smelt wonderful—like a whole field of dandelions. Dido ran back along the yard, clambered by means of the wheelbarrow on to the cask and so to the roof, through the pigeon hole, down through the loft entrance, and was able to unbolt the cottage's front door just as Mr. Firkin arrived.
    Captain Hughes was stirring again, more wakeful this time, and very glad of the posset.
    "Puts me in mind of the Chinese lily soup we used to get
in Poohoo province," he said. It soon made him drowsy, and he slept again.
    "D'you think he looks all right, mister, or d'you reckon he's feverish?" Dido asked Mr. Firkin.
    "Nay, I'm bline, darter, I can't see him! Mis' Lubbage'll be the one to tell ee how he'm