Yet by and by, when they had worked their fill at the hedge-cutting, and it was dinner-time, David drew the farmer aside. He had not known till now what had brought him to the fields here, instead of to the smithy where he had urgent work to do. For the blacksmith’s brain was like an eight-day clock that stands in the kitchen corner; it moved slowly--_tick-tack, tick-tack_, with sober repetition--but, when the moment came to strike the hour, there was never any doubt as to the time he had in mind. “John Hirst,” he said, “ne’er mind your dinner yet awhile. I’ve somewhat lies on my chest, as a body might say.” “Well, I lay there not a long while since, a trifle sudden and a trifle hard,” laughed Hirst. “Ah, now, will ye be quiet? I’m like Fool Billy, as Priscilla said just now, and ye think I’m jesting when I’m trying to talk sober sense.” “Dinner-time is sober sense, David, judging by my itch to get at cheese and bread and good brown ale. What then, lad? What ails ye?” “I’m slow of speech, unlike my smithy-bellows,” went on the other doggedly. “I find the right word always the day after to-morrow, instead of the day’s minute that I want it.” “I’ve a trick of the same kind myself, David. What then? Speech is speech, but trimming a thorn-hedge, or ploughing for your turnip-crop, is a sight better than hunting words. Tuts, David! Ye’re yellow about the gills, and some trouble’s sitting on ye, by that token.” “Ay, some trouble is,” said David. “Priscilla gave ye cake and ale?” put in the other anxiously. “She forgot to offer it, and I forgot to lack it.” David’s eyes followed the neat line of the hedge, and he nodded gravely at it. “Wish men were more like thorn-bushes, John--wish you could lop their unruliness, and twist their ill-grown branches into shape, and make a clean, useful hedge at the end of all.” Farmer Hirst was thinking of his dinner with gaining tenderness. “What is in your mind, David, lad?” he asked. “’Tis like watching the kettle boil, this getting at your meaning.” “Reuben Gaunt is back again in Garth,” the smith blurted out. “That’s my meaning, John, and I tell you we could well have let him stay t’ other side of the world, and ne’er have missed him.” The farmer’s face clouded for a moment. “We could have spared him--ay. But what of it? Because a fool chooses to come home again, are we to go pulling fiddle-faces on a blithesome day like this? Hark ye, David, I’ll not bide a minute longer; there’s cheese and ale all waiting in the hedge-bottom yonder, and you’re going to share it with us.” So David laid his trouble aside for the moment, and the four of them sat on the sunny hedge-bank, and said little until for the second or third time they took more cheese to help the butter out, or more bread to help the cheese out, or another pull of ale “to settle the lot trimly into place.”