"Well, father, how are you?" And I clasped his outstretched hand in mine as he drew the other across his moist brow before pulling his horn spectacles from the crown of his head, where they rested when he was not sleeping or engaged in searching for them in every nook and corner of the house, and often even then. "This is my friend Jim, of whom you've heard me speak." "And welcome kindly, Jim, to Pole Moor. You'll stop the week-end, of course, though I fear you'll have to share Abel's bed--that is if it will hold you both. Have you seen Ruth? She'll be milking, I doubt. But come your ways into the house. You'll be tired after your walk, and a pint of home-brewed won't come amiss. Or would you prefer buttermilk? Ruth! Ruth!" my father called, and as we entered the tiny manse--Jim spent a good few minutes scraping his feet on the doormat, an act his mother solemnly enjoined upon him e'er we left--Ruth herself emerged, hot and flushed, from the barn, her milking-stool tucked under one arm, a frothing piggin of milk fresh from the udders borne carefully in her right hand. "Don't come near me, Abe, or I'st spill." Jim has since confided to me that at first glance of my sister's sonsie face and first sound of her tuneful voice his heart gave a bound within his breast and then left his keeping for good and all--and indeed the maiden was a picture fair enough to look upon. Anyway he grew red in the face, pulled off his cap, and made what he called "a bow and a scrape," whilst Ruth smiled up into his face with one swift look that I doubt not took in his six feet six inches at a glance, and then scurried off, ostensibly to draw the home-brewed; though as a rule beer barrels are not kept in the bedroom, and it doesn't need to don a clean print dress and ribbons and lash your hair before drawing a jug of ale. We quenched our thirst with that modest home-brewed, Jim vowing without a qualm that better he'd never supped, no not in any inn between Greenfield and Huddersfield, and professing incredulity when assured that Ruth had brewed it herself; though, if truth must be told, the liquor was little other than coloured water with a head on it, and Jim could have drunk a barrel of it without, as they say, "getting forrader"--but I blush to say that from this out Jim began to display powers of dissimulation hitherto unsuspected, even going so far as to assure my reverend sire, before we left Pole Moor, that he had long felt uneasy about his own soul's welfare, and doubted he should never find peace till he had been duly "dipped"--Jim, who could scarce be dragged to church, and who made open scoff of the Methody carryings-on at Wrigley Mill.