They were about twenty in all, and, as they skirted the pond, their figures were sharply silhouetted against the grey sky.  Each of the women held a baby close to her breast and bent over it as she advanced against the wind, that beat her gown tightly against her legs and blew it out behind in bellying folds.  Yet beneath their uncouth and bedraggled garments they moved like mothers of a mighty race, tall, large-limbed, broad of hip, hiding generous breasts beneath the shawls—­red, grey, and black—­that covered their babes from the wind and rain.  A few of the children struggled forward under ricketty umbrellas; but the mothers had their hands full, and strode along unsheltered.  More than one, indeed, faced the storm without bonnet or covering for the head; and all marched along the causeway like figures on some sculptured frieze, their shadows broken beneath them on the ruffled surface of the pond.  I said that each of the women carried a babe:  but there was one who did not—­a plain, squat creature, at the tail of the procession, who wore a thick scarf round her neck, and a shawl of divers bright colours.  She led a small child along with one hand, and with the other attempted to keep a large umbrella against the wind.

“Nineteen—­twenty—­twenty-one,” counted the toll-keeper’s widow behind me as I watched the spasmodic jerkings of this umbrella.  “I wasn’t far out in my reckon.  And you, sir, make twenty-two.  It niver rains but it pours, they say.  Times enow I don’t see a soul for days together, not to hail by name, an’ now you drops in on top of a Vaccination.”

Her sigh over this plethora of good fortune was interrupted by a knocking at the door, and the mothers trooped in, their clothes dripping pools of water on the sanded lime-ash.  One or two of them, after exchanging greetings with their hostess, bade me Good-morning:  others eyed me in silence as they took their seats round the wall.  All whose babes were not sound asleep quietly undid their bodices and began to give them suck.  The older children scrambled into chairs and sat kicking their heels and tracing patterns on the floor with the water that ran off their umbrellas.  They were restless but rather silent, as if awed by the shadow of the coming Vaccination.  The woman who had brought up the procession, found a place in the far corner, and began to unwind the comforter around her neck.  Her eyes were brighter and more agitated than any in the room.

“A brave trapse all the way from Upper Woon,” remarked the youngest mother, wiping a smear of rain from her baby’s forehead.

“Ah, ’tis your first, Mary Polsue.  Wait till you’ve carried twelve such loads, my dear,” said a tall middle-aged woman, whose black hair, coarse as a mane, was powdered grey with, raindrops.

“Dear now, Ellen; be this the twelfth?” our hostess exclaimed.  “I was reckonin’ it the ’leventh.”

“Ay, th’ twelfth—­tho’ I’ve most lost count.  I buried one, you know.”