"Yon!" cried the old man, ungratefully, "caa ye that half a day's wark? But I'm far frae denyin' that, sic as it was, it helped. Ow, ay, it was aye a help! And at ony rate the hay's under cover--some thack-and-rape, and some in the new-fangled shed. But what's your wull? Ye are no seekin' wages, I'm thinkin'. Maybe ye want me to turn my coat and come doon to your bit tabernacle? Aweel, ye may want." "Oh, no," said Mr. Ablethorpe, smiling. "I was just hoping that perhaps your good wife would brew us a cup of tea. I think both Joe and I would be the better of it." You should have seen how the old farmer's face lit up. Hospitality was a beautiful thing to him. He rejoiced in that, at least. And if, as some folk say--not Mr. Ablethorpe--an elder is the same as a bishop, then the old Free Kirker had at least one of the necessary qualities. He was "given to hospitality." Whether he was, as is also required, "no striker," I would not just like to say, or to try. But Caleb took us indoors out of the slight oncoming drizzle, which was beginning to spray down from the clouds, or creep up from the valleys--I am not sure which. At any rate, it was there, close-serried, wetting. Now heretofore I had only seen Mrs. Caleb when she was ordered down from the long stack under the zinc-roofed shed, which her husband was never tired of declaiming against as "new-fangled," yet to which he owed that night the safety of his crop. Mrs. Caleb was a good twenty years younger than her lord, still, indeed, bearing traces of that special kind of good looks which the Scots call "sonsiness." Susan Fergusson at five-and-forty was sonsy to the last degree. Her husband, twenty years older, was sun-dried and wind-dried and frost-bitten till he had become sapless as a leaf blown along the highway on a bask March day, when the fields are full of sowers, and the roads cloudy with "stoor." "Come ben! This way, sir--and you, too, Joe," she cried, opening a door into an inner room, "ye will no hae seen Meysie's bairns?" As I had never even heard of Meysie, I certainly had not. But the goodwife's next words enlightened me. "Caleb, ye see, was marriet afore he took up wi' me. 'Deed, his lassie Meysie is maybe aulder than I am mysel'--and a solit, sensible woman. But this is the first time her bairns hae comed sae far to see me!" She flung the door open, and there, sitting one on a sofa, and the other on a footstool by the fire, I saw two grown-up young ladies--so at least they appeared to me. And I began to fear that my tea was going to cost me dear. For at that time conversation was a difficult art to me with anyone whom I could neither fight nor call names.