And here I must interrupt the Walk for a little while to speak of life at the lonely farms, where they so kindly took me in. Nearly always they said, "No," at first. If they gave no reason, or an incontrovertible one, I went away. If they said, "We can't get meat for oorsel's, and we're fair stoured wi' rabbits," I saw my chance, and protested that I wanted no meat at all, only eggs and bread and butter and milk. Then they usually yielded at once, with a "Well, ye sanna go hungert!" The middle of May is the annual moving-time for the farms, I found; so it is a bad time to try to get taken in. Once they had hardly got straight after a move when I called, and the good-wife said doubtfully, "Would ye mind a fixt bed?" "Oh dear, no," I said gaily, not having the faintest idea what it was! But I thought it must be better than a peripatetic one! When the time came, my bed looked very ordinary indeed, and I was quite disappointed. I made inquiries, and the housewife smiled, and said her extra bed had come by the carrier unexpectedly soon. "But ye can see the fixt bed if ye like." I found it was a two-legged wooden bedstead forming part of the structure of a {130} small attic, with the back built against the wall, and the two legs at the foot immovably glued to the floor. Rather nice, when one moves in to a new house, to find one bed already there! At these "out-by" farms they keep very early hours; they often have dinner at 10.30, tea at 2.30, supper at 5.30, and go to bed at 7.30. Sometimes I would spend a day out with the children on the moors, or mosses, as they are usually called, where in places the draining-ditches are so close together that progress is a perpetual jump. Or if there are no ditches, it means jumping from one clump of rushes to the next. But "nae rash-bush e'er deceived true Scot," as the proverb says, and the rush-bushes never let us down, Scots though we were not. There I saw cranberry-blossom for the first time; and any amount of milk-wort, all colours, and butter-wort, and the sticky round-leaved sundew. Once they made me cut a peat, my first peat, standing by and laughing while I tried my prentice-hand at it. It looks so easy to cut one of these slices of "chocolate-mould." But it isn't! The crust of the ground is hard, and one is apt not to exert enough force to start with. Then perhaps one overdoes it, and goes through the crust all of a sudden, and so slithering down through the soft damp peat far more quickly than one intended. {131} But they were kind to me, though they laughed. They said: "She didn't break her first peat; that was champion!" We would roam on the moors and hear the badgers barking, and sometimes we would see one; and we'd go and watch the sheep-washing down by the "Sike." There is no end to what one can do in the country "out-by"!