The natural stopped, suddenly as if he had been indeed a dog and his master had whistled him down. “Garth Street is not what it used to be, David,” he observed, dispassionately. “More muckiness about the roads, though why I know not, seeing they’re smooth and silver at this moment.” David said nothing for awhile; but he saw Reuben Gaunt lift his cap to Priscilla, with that indescribable air of overdoing the matter which roused the blacksmith’s temper. He saw, too, that they stayed and chatted--Priscilla laughing--and afterwards went up the Thorlburn bridle-way, which led to a field-track winding at long last to Good Intent. “Come in, Billy,” said the smith--his voice came suddenly, and was half-brother to a sob--“come away in and play at blowing the bellows, while I fire the ends of those posts that Farmer Hirst is wanting.” “What does he want ’em for, like?” asked the natural, curious at all times. “To make a pen for yon rambling turkeys. The hens will go wandering after the cock-bird, and they’re laying in the hedge-bottoms, and over t’ other side the beck, and Lord knows where. ’Tisn’t the hens I blame, Billy; ’tis the ruffling master-bird, with his tail spread like a silly peacock’s. Pen him in we will, Billy--and, if he breaks his neck in the wire-netting, so much the better for all sides.” It was rarely that David allowed himself so stormy an outbreak. Had he taken his wooing in this fashion two weeks and a day ago in the farmyard of Good Intent, breaking down the barriers of diffidence--Priscilla’s and his own--there might have been a different life-tale for David the Smith. “Te-he!” chuckled Billy the Fool, shambling toward the smithy. “’Twould be a rare game to pen in the turkey-cock. _Gobble-gobble di-gobble_, he goes, whenever he comes across the likes o’ me, and his wattle goes red as the floor, David, when a man’s been killing a cow. Ay, I’ll blow the bellows for ye, if so ye’re going to prison up yond old, prideful devil.” “Soothes a body’s temper,” muttered David, after he had been at work for half an hour--thrusting the pine-posts into the blaze, turning them about, taking them away when the pointed ends were charred sufficiently, while Billy played contentedly and hard with the bellows. “God knows I’d like to see Priscilla happy, with me or another man; but Reuben Gaunt sticks in my gizzard like a fish-bone.” He laughed quietly, for he always sought from humour an antidote against the storm-winds of life. “Suits me, seemingly,” he said to himself, “to be fair mad with a man; for work takes the tetchy humours out of ye, and work pays ye afterwards.”