“Now, Nanny, I hope you are well to-day,” Alice said, kindly, though by no means eager to hold discourse with her just now; “you are working hard, I see, as usual.” “Ay, ay, working hard, the same as us all be born to, and goes out of the world with the sweat of our brow. Not the likes of you, Miss Alice. All the world be made to fit you, the same as a pudding do to a basin.” “Now, Nanny, you ought to know better than that. There is nobody born to such luck, and to keep it. Shall I carry your fagot for you? How cleverly you do tie them!” “’Ee may carr the fagot as far as ’ee wool. ’Ee wunt goo very far, I count. The skin of thee isn’t thick enow. There, set ’un down now beside of the well. What be all this news about Haylery?” “News about Hilary, Nanny Stilgoe! Why, who has told you anything?” “There’s many a thing as comes to my knowledge without no need of telling. He have broken with his father, haven’t he? Ho, ho, ho!” “Nanny, you never should talk like that. As if you thought it a very fine thing, after all you have had to do with us!” “And all I owes you! Oh yes, yes; no need to be bringing it to my mind, when I gets it in a basin every Sunday.” “Now, Mrs. Stilgoe, you must remember that it was your own wish to have it so. You complained that the gravy was gone into grease, and did we expect you to have a great fire, and you came up and chose a brown basin yourself, and the cloth it was to be tied in; and you said that then you would be satisfied.” “Well, well, you know it all by heart. I never pays heed to them little things. I leaves all of that for the great folk. Howsever, I have a good right to be told what doth not consarn no strangers.” “You said that you knew it all without telling! The story, however, is too true this time. But I hope it may be for a short time only.” “All along of a chield of a girl--warn’t it all along of that? Boys thinks they be sugar-plums always, till they knows ’en better.” “Why, Nanny, now, how rude you are! What am I but a child of a girl? Much better, I hope, than a sugar-plum.” “Don’t tell me! Now, you see the water in that well. Clear and bright, and not so deep as this here stick of mine is.” “Beautifully cool and sparkling even after the long hot weather. How I wish we had such a well on the hill! What a comfort it must be to you!” “Holy water, they calls it, don’t ’em? Holy water, tino! But it do well enough to boil the kittle, when there be no frogs in it. My father told me that his grandfather, or one of his forebears afore him, seed this well in the middle of a great roaring torrent, ten feet over top of this here top step. It came all the way from your hill, he said. It fetched more water than Adur river; and the track of it can be followed now.” “I have heard of it,” answered Alice, with a little shiver of superstition; “I have always longed to know more about it.”