The boy’s account of the fight was given as he sat by her side in her little pony-trap in the cheerfully frosty morning. Dick chatted gaily as the shaggy-backed pony trotted along the resounding road with a clatter of hoofs and a jingle of harness, and an occasional sneeze at the frosty air. They passed the field of battle on the road, and Dick pointed it out. Then, as was natural, he turned to the family feud, and retailed all he had heard from Ichabod, supplemented by information from other quarters and such additions of fancy as imaginative children and savages are sure to weave about the fabric of any story which comes in their way to make tradition generally the trustworthy thing it is. Mrs. Busker was strong on the family quarrel. A family quarrel was a great thing in her estimation, almost as good as a family ghost, and she gave Dick the whole history of the incident of the brook and of many others which had grown out of it, among them one concerning the death of a certain Reddy which had tragically come to pass a year or two before his birth. The said Reddy had been found one November evening stark and cold at the corner of the parson’s spinney, with an empty gun grasped in his stiffened hand, and a whole charge of small shot in his breast. Crowner’s quest had resulted in a verdict of death by misadventure, and the generally received explanation was that the young fellow’s own gun had worked the mischief by careless handling in passing through stiff undergrowth. But a certain ne’er-do-well Mountain, a noted striker and tosspot of the district, had mysteriously disappeared about that date, and had never since come within scope of Castle Barfield knowledge. Ugly rumours had got afloat, vague and formless, and soon to die out of general memory. Dick listened open-mouthed to all this, and when the narrative was concluded, held his peace for at least two minutes. ‘_She_ isn’t wicked, is she, Aunt Jenny?’ he suddenly demanded. ‘She? Who? ‘asked Mrs. Eusker in return. ‘The little girl, Julia.’ ‘Wicked? Sakes alive, whativer is the boy talking about? Wicked? O’ course not. She’s a dear good little thing as iver lived.’ ‘Ichabod said that all the Mountains were wicked. But I know Joe isn’t--at least, not very. He promised me a monkey and a parrot--a green parrot, when he came back from running away. But he didn’t run away, because father found him and took him home. His father gave him an awful thrashing. He often thrashes him, Joe says. Father never thrashes me. What does his father thrash him for?’ ‘Mr. Mountain’s a harder man than your father, my dear. An’ I fear as Joe’s a bit wild, like his father when he was a boy, and obstinit. Theer niver was a obstinater man i’ this earth than Samson Mountain, I do believe, an’ Joe’s got a bit on it in him.’ ‘She’s pretty,’ said Dick, returning with sudden childish inconsequence to the subject uppermost in his thoughts. ‘Joe isn’t Why is it that the girls are always prettier than the boys?’