“Oh, I’d get you one,” said Jinny carelessly, “but I’ll wager you won’t blow it properly in a week, much less an hour!” “A week! What nonsense! In a moment.” “In a moment?” “I was speaking to mother. What’ll you wager?” “A pair of gloves,” said Jinny. “Done!” said Will. She clucked to Methusalem. “Good-bye,” she called to the couple as the cart moved off. “I’ll deliver your order next Friday, Will—without fail.” “Dearie, whatever are you running after her for?” cried Martha. He came back sheepishly: “I thought the gate wasn’t open.” From the Bradmarsh road the sound of the “fol-de-rol” refrain came sweetly on the quiet air. “I wish she would sing of Zion,” repeated Martha wistfully. III The pair of polecat ferrets—creamy white albinos, pink of eye and black of belly—hung in the cages on the back wall of the farmhouse, with a spare cage beside them as a retiring-place when a hutch was turned out. But only once—on the Saturday in the first ardour of possession—had Will taken them out a-hunting: on which occasion they had refused to rat or rabbit. Indeed their leaps and gambols persuaded Will that they pursued—as he remembered the Deacon once maintaining sympathetically about rats—their “private sports.” Why indeed should sensible creatures, comfortably fed on chicken-head and blackbirds, and provided with straw to cocoon themselves against cold, go squeezing into holes or drains? Restored to captivity, these fainéant ferrets spent most of their day in squirming with desperate restlessness from one end of the cage to the other and perking their quivering noses and little black claws through the wires. And their master’s own plight was much the same, for after the prairie, Frog Farm was only a hutch to him: his father, too, being so unexpectedly on the shelf, there was nothing that really needed him, nor was there any land for sale in the vicinity on which he might commence operations. Like his ferrets, if with a larger run, he swayed restlessly to and fro; from farm to river, from river to Common, from Common to Steeples Wood, from Steeples Wood to Frog Farm.