Welcomed at lonely farmyards where fierce dogs sometimes broke their chains for the joy of licking her hand or of flying at Nip’s throat; not less welcome in village High Streets, where every other house would ply her fussily with orders that she took coolly and without a single note, her bosom knowledge of everybody’s business and her dramatic interpretation of any abnormal commission infusing life into her work that saved her from slips of memory; adored by all the swains and yokels who hauled her goods and chattels up and down, but radiating only a frosty sunshine in return, for none had ever been able to pass the ice-barrier that separated her private self from her professional geniality; jumping down herself only to give Christian burial to hapless moles, rats, shrews, leverets, and blood-stained feathers, or to glean for lonely old women or the numerous and impoverished Pennymole family the unconscious largesse of more careless drivers—turnips, lumps of coal, wisps of hay; chaffering with beaming shopkeepers on behalf of her clients, and hail-fellow-well-met with her fellow-carriers, encountered at cross-roads or “The Black Sheep”; Jinny pursued her unmaidenly career in fine weather or foul, sometimes wayworn, wind-whipped, rain-drenched, and with aching forehead, but more often with a vital joy that was not least keen when Methusalem—cloud-exhaling and clogged by snow that sometimes raised the road as high as the hedges—had to plough his way along a track hewn out by labourers, with here and there a siding cut in the glittering mass for carts to pass each other by. Those were days not devoid of danger: road, hedge, ditch, and field obliterated in one snowy expanse. Once Jinny’s cart had to be dug out like a crusted fossil of the Ice Age—and only the agonized howling of Nip had brought rescue. III It was the first time he had justified his air of managing the whole concern round which he barked and bounded and scurried as though Methusalem and Jinny were his minions. He had indeed commandeered them—jumping originally out of nowhere on to the tail-board—and however he strayed from the path of their duty in his numberless tangential excursions and expeditions, they knew he would never abandon them.