"Them's first-rate. Like to eat 'em?" "Eat them!" cried Rotha. "Such young pigs?" "Just prime now," said the man, looking at them lovingly over the fence, while grunting noses sniffing in his direction testified that the inmates of the pen knew him as well as he knew them. "Just prime; they's four, goin' on five, weeks old. Prissy's at me to give her one on 'em; and maybe I will, now you've come. I telled her it was expensive, to eat up a half a winter's stock for one dinner. I aint as extravagant as Prissy." "How 'half a winter's stock'?" said Rotha, by way of saying something. "Bless you, don't you see? Every one o' them fellers'd weigh two hundred by next Christmas; and that'd keep Prissy and me more'n half the winter. I s'pose you won't be here to help us eat it then?" "Next Christmas! No," said Rotha. "I shall not be here so long as that." "Summer's got to come first, hain't it? Well, you might be in a wuss place." Slowly Mr. Purcell and Rotha left the pig pen and the barnyard and came out into the space between the various farm buildings. "Where does that road lead to?" Rotha asked, pointing to one which ran on from the barns with a seemingly straight track between fields. "That? that don't lead no wheres." "Where should I find myself, if I followed it out to the end?" "You'd find yourself jammed up agin the hill. Don't you see them trees? that's a hill runnin' along there." "Running right and left? It is not high. Just a hilly ridge. What is on it?" "Nothin's on it, but a mean little pack o' savins Aint good for nothin'; not even worth cuttin' for firewood. What ever do you s'pose hills was made for? I mean, sich hills; that haint got nothin' onto 'em but rocks. What's the use of 'em?" "If it wasn't for hills, Mr. Purcell, your low lands would have no water; or only in a pond or a ditch here and there." "What's the reason they wouldn't? There aint no water on the hills now." "Springs?" "There's springs every place. I could count you a half a dozen in less'n half a mile." "Ay, but the springs come from the hills; and if it were not for the hills they would not be anywhere." "O' course it's so, since you say it," said Mr. Purcell, scratching his head with a comic expression of eye;--"but I never see the world when there warn't no hills on it; and I reckon you didn't." Rotha let the question drop. "I s'pose you'd say, accordin' to that, the rocks made the soft soil?" "They have made a good deal of it," said Rotha smiling. "Whose hammer broke 'em up?" "No hammer. But water, and weather; frost and wet and sunshine." "Sunshine!" cried Mr. Purcell. "They are always wearing away the rocks. They do it slowly, and yet faster than you think." "But I'll tell you. You forget. The soil aint up there--it's down here." "Yes, I know. I do not forget. Water brought it down."