The dairy and kitchen were by far the largest rooms in the farmhouse, so that Agneta felt justified in haunting them, even without the inducement of playing at making butter and cheese, and baking home-made bread, much as Harry and Horry played at cutting down and gathering in sheaves, and driving home and stacking the corn. Agneta found another excuse in hopeless endeavours to sketch the great open chimney-place, and its clumsy oven piled round with billets of wood; or a section of the dark beams of the low roof which Harry’s middle-aged housekeeper had already hung again thickly, as of old, with red and white beef and bacon, brown nets full of pale green onions, and bunches of olive and sage-coloured pot-herbs; or the wooden trap stair which ascended to a room above, that Harry, like a true farmer, had immediately appropriated to himself because it lacked a partition on the kitchen side, and from the narrow elevated platform, looking down into the yawning gulf beneath, Harry was supposed to inspect and address his farm servants assembled of a morning, to give in their reports and receive his orders. Of course there was no accommodation in either of the two tiny parlours for morning callers, or dinner guests—who must have come to dine before they came to call, or so much as had lunch—a topsy-turvy reversal of all household arrangements hitherto known to Agneta, which fascinated her like every other unapprehended possibility of primitive housekeeping. As to an evening party, with hired music, dancing, ices and supper anywhere else save spread like a gipsy tea on the rough grass of the paddock, Agneta laughed the low tuneful laugh which was almost as purely gleeful as Harry’s, at the mere absurdity of the picture conjured up by the imagination. But who wanted morning callers, or the wittiest diners-out, such as Agneta had heard her Aunt Julia talk of, or even the best waltzer in London—whom anybody could have, so soon as she was presented and came out—down here at Copley Grange Farm with the boys in their retreat? Harry hunted for hens’ and ducks’ eggs with Agneta in the poultry and straw yards and by the pond, just as he had formerly hunted with her for blackbirds’ and chaffinches’ nests in the shrubberies at Thornley Lodge. He took her, too, every day to his stables and cowhouse, and he had promised she should milk a cow before she left. He let her accompany him and Horry when the weather was fine to the fields, and when it was bad to the barn, to watch the operations of the thrashing-mill and fanners. He had helped her to climb up once beside him, to a throne of sheaves in a corn-cart, and driven her in triumph into the yard, which Agneta held for the moment to be much better than occupying the box-seat on a drag, as most girls had an opportunity of doing on some occasion in their lives. CHAPTER XVIII. OLIVER’S LECTURE ON WORDSWORTH.