Maria can have as good any
day o' the year, an' don't appear to value it to that extent."
They walked back through the orchards in silence. At Miss Sarah's
quay-door they parted, and John hoisted sail for his home around the
corner of the coast.
DAPHNIS.
_Has olim exuvias mihi perfidus ille reliquit,
Pignora cara sui: quae nunc ego limine in ipso,
Terra, tibi mando; debent haec pignora Daphnin--
Ducite ab urbe domum, mea, carmina, ducite Daphnin_.
I knew the superstition lingered along the country-side: and I was
sworn to find it. But the labourers and their wives smoothed all
intelligence out of their faces as soon as I began to hint at it. Such
is the way of them. They were my good friends, but had no mind to help
me in this. Nobody who has not lived long with them can divine the
number of small incommunicable mysteries and racial secrets chambered
in their inner hearts and guarded by their hospitable faces. These
alone the Celt withholds from the Saxon, and when he dies they are
buried with him.
A chance word or two of my old nurse, by chance caught in some cranny
of a child's memory and recovered after many days, told me that the
charm was still practised by the woman-folk, or had been practised not
long before her death.
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