"Not I!" replied the younger girl. "My head's stuffed with lighter rubbish," and she shuddered as her eyes fell upon a huddled white heap under a thorn. "It mazes me," continued Barbara, "when I think that yon poor creature I've thought so silly mappen knows more than I do now. Death must be a queer waking, Lucy. It's likely we'll find that we're very different to what we fancied we were. It's likely we're not the only things with souls. It's likely that the world wasn't just made for us, and all the creatures for our use. Old Camomile says that every blade of grass has its own little green soul, and loves the wind and the sunshine and the rain, and has its ideas about the sky and the stars. Mappen it puts us down as girt senseless creatures, too coarse-minded to understand its thoughts." "Old Camomile is getting old," said Lucy. "He havers a lot." Barbara was silent. She rarely spoke because she rarely found anyone to understand her, save the old man Timothy Hadwin, called by the villagers Old Camomile, because he made potions, and electuaries, and essences, curing their aches and pains as if by magic. Lucy rolled up her wool, put the ball in her pocket, and looked slowly round. "It's a lonely-like place to spend the night," she said. "I wonder you're not afraid." "Sometimes I am," replied Barbara. She recalled nights when she had trembled before the vastness of the hills, when the winds had deafened her with stories of things she could not comprehend, when she had turned from gazing at the cold light of the stars with a fear at her heart, because they would answer nothing to all her questions. Barbara was not educated as the world counts education. It is true that she knew the fells and dales, the tarns and meres of her native country, as well as the oldest shepherd, who had spent his long life among them. She could tell the names of the constellations, and take her direction upon the darkling moors from them. She knew when to plough and sow and reap. No one was so weather-wise as she in the village. But this is not education in the eyes of the world, and Barbara set little value upon her knowledge. She could not speak the King's English, though she spoke something much more picturesque and vigorous; she only read the simplest books; and wrote an ungainly, but characteristic hand. She knew no history, but her mind was furnished with a collection of tales and legends, which held more of the inner truth of history than the bare facts. Yet she longed with all her ardent nature for the learning contained in books; for the power to grasp the thoughts that flashed across her mind and left upon it an impression as of a great flying light, which, if it had not eluded her, would have illumined her whole being. She pined for the life of the intellect.