"If thoo said, 'Here's a fine bird worth the picking,' they'd have come like a flock of starlings after a bone, aye, would they." Joel turned away with a haughty shrug of his shoulders, and Red Geordie sniggered, in no way disconcerted. "Well, what's been adoing down-by?" asked the dame, anxious not to offend her lordly guest. "Marrying, kersening, and burying--just the day's work o' common folk." "Day's work, says you! It's little we sees o' such goings on in the Girdlestone, saving the mating o' wind and rain, the birth o' snow-storm, and the death o' summer on the fells. Be canny now and tell us o' the news. Whose married? whose been kirsened? and whose dead down-by?" "Well," replied Red Geordie, sipping his mulled ale with satisfaction, "there's triplets in Troutbeck, and they's been called Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego." "Sakes alive! it's enough to make Anabaptists o' them; they'll be wanting to be rekirstened when they're grown up. Whatever was their mother thinking o' to lay such a saddle on the lad-bairns's backs?" Red Geordie tossed off his ale and handed the mug back to be filled again. "Pack horses, pack horses," he cried, "hey, mistress, we're all pack horses on the road. Some on us carries one thing, some on us carries another; some has his mother's follies, and some his dadda's sins, forbye the sins and follies of his own getting." "Aye, it's a wonder when you come to think o' it--the cross-bred sheep we be!" said the good-wife. Red Geordie again handed back his mug. "I'll have another glass, mistress, with a dash more nutmeg in it to warm the thrapple. Now, Master Camomile, what kind o' fate would you foretell for the three lad bairns, born at a birth? They ought to turn out something by-ordinary." Timothy shook his head. "Doubtless they will suffer the common lot of man," he replied, "and pass through the fiery furnace of tribulation like other folks. Happy will they be if they can sing with the Hebrew children, 'Oh, ye fire and heat, bless ye the Lord, praise Him and magnify Him for ever.'" Joel looked up quickly. "I never believed the story," he said, "men don't praise God in the midst of the fiery furnace. They're more likely to curse Him." Ever since the pack-master's rollicking personality had entered the inn kitchen, Joel had kept a moody silence. He disliked the quizzical glance of the man; and the bald head, with its upstanding fringe of red hair, raised an unreasonable antipathy in his mind. If the weather had not been so cold and damp, he would have left his seat in the ingle-nook and gone out, preferring the mist to becoming the target for Red Geordie's eyes. His sudden outburst caused an uneasy pause, not so much because of the words, but the intensity with which they were spoken. They seemed to have been thrown off from the man's mind as smoke is thrown up from a volcano. They were the sign of the fires burning within him.