"Janet's Cove" was a story of the birds, and Grannie's knowledge of the life and habits of birds seemed wonderful to them. Crippled with rheumatism as she was, and unable to move from her bed, she nevertheless watched for the return of the spring and autumn migrants with all the eagerness of the born naturalist. She offered the children money if they would bring her the first tidings of the arrival of birds in the dale. There was always a halfpenny underneath the geranium pot in the window-sill for the child whose eye caught sight of the first swallow, redstart or sandpiper; or whose ear first recognised the clarion call of the cuckoo, or the evening "bleat" of the nightjar on the bracken-mantled fells at the end of May. Or, if the season were autumn, the children were told to watch for the arrival of the woodcock and the earliest flock of Norwegian fieldfares. Under Grannie's tuition more than one generation in the village had learnt to take an interest in the movements of migrants in the dale, and that was why the story of Janet and the birds never failed to charm the ears of the children gathered round the kitchen hearth. "Now then," Grannie would begin, "if I'm boun' to tell you t' tale o' Janet's Cove, you mun set yoursels down an' be whisht. Tak a seat at t' top o' bag o' provand, Kester; Betty and Will can hug chairs to t' fire, and lile Joe Moon mun sit on t' end o' t' bed." Such was Grannie's arrangement of the seats, while to me, the visitor, was assigned the "lang-settle" on the other side of the fireplace. It was a coign of vantage which I shared with the ancestral copper warming-pan, and from it I could see the whole group. Grannie, bent half-double with rheumatism, was propped up in her bed, with the children grouped around her. She wore, as usual, her white mutch cap and grey shawl. Mittens covered her wrists, and her fingers, painfully swollen with chalk-stones, plied her knitting-needles. Her face was sunken in the cheeks and round her mouth, but her large brown eyes, still full of animation, broad forehead, and high-arched brows gave dignity and even beauty to her pale countenance. On the fire the porridge was warming for the calves' supper, while suspended from the wooden ceiling was the "bread-flake," a hurdle-shaped structure across the bars of which hung the pieces of oatcake which were eaten with buttermilk at supper.