And Annica, Andrew's wife, cursed and beaten and bruised; and Andrew the younger, his lawful son, and Alice _his_ wife, who were treated as dogs, and wore out their lives up at the farmstead farther in the hills: in Millbourne churchyard the moss has grown over their names graven on the sides of the great square tomb. May, their child, alone lived, a blithe and gentle creature, dreading her grim grandfather, only breathing freely when she could get away down to Greene Ferne, yet trying and schooling herself to love him; but hating Jane, the old snuff-taking housekeeper, as intensely as so affectionate a nature could hate anything. Yet once more the swallows were wheeling in the summer air. On the keystone of the porch was chiselled Anno 15--; the other figures effaced, but cut some time in the century that saw the Armada. A vast, rambling, many-gabled, red-tiled building, with vines and cherries trained against the grey walls, and honeysuckle creeping about the porch. The steep Downs rose behind, barely a gunshot distant; from Andrew's window there was an open view of the vale. The pool almost surrounded the garden--part moat, part fishpond, part mill-pool--and was crossed by a wooden bridge. There the moorhens swam and threw up their white-marked tails as they thrust their beaks under water; the timid dab-chick, which no familiarity with man can reassure, dived at the faintest footstep; the pike basked in the sunshine warming his cold blood, and the sturdy perch with tremulous tail faced the slow stream. By the stones of the sluice dark-green ferns flourished exceedingly. The sheep crept along the steep coombe-side cropping the short sweet grass; the shepherd sat on the edge and cut his own and his sweetheart's name in the turf. Time was when Andrew could run up the hill there light as a hare. Now his slow walk, hard bearing on blackthorn staff, in summer went no farther than the green before the porch, where the sundial stood with the motto on its brazen face, bidding men to number none but the happy hours, and to forget the dark and shadowy--a bitter mockery at fourscore and ten. In winter he crept twice or thrice a day across the courtyard to the barn, where, despite steam, he kept three old men at work on the threshing-floor--not for charity, but because he liked to listen to the knock-knock of the flails. Ever round and round, without haste and without rest, went the massive wheel in the mill--ceaseless as the revolving firmament--to the clack of the noisy hopper and creak of the iron gudgeons, and the flousing splash of the mill-race. Hard as his own nether millstone was the heart of Andrew Fisher: does time soften the gnarled stem of the oak?