I went up to the door, and opening it stood within the shelter of the porch for a while, and heard someone reading aloud.  Soon I gathered courage enough to approach the inner door, and look through its little window into the room.  A rousing fire of peats and dried heather was blazing on the hearth, around which the family were gathered in a half circle.  In an armchair, with a open book on his knee, sat Carver himself.  By his side sat his wife knitting a stocking, the firelight glinting on her fair hair.  Near to her were a ploughman and a herd boy, also a young woman who did the light field work on the farm and milked the cows, made butter, and helped in the house.  Tom sat by the fire opposite his father, and I could see that he was polishing with a piece of leather one of his silver coins.  Thora, whose silken hair and beautiful face I regarded with greater satisfaction than any other feature of this group, sat apart from the others, as though she did not care, or had not been invited, to draw her stool nearer to the warmth.

Carver Kinlay, black bearded and hoarse of voice, was reading aloud to his family, and seemed to be expecting from them an attention to the Holy Word which he certainly did not sincerely give to it himself.  When he came to the end of a passage which he considered required expounding, he would take off his reading spectacles and wipe them with a corner of his wife’s white apron.

“Now, I have explained many times before about this, bairns,” he was saying as he looked towards Thora and Tom.  “It is a rule, a golden rule, that the merest child might understand.  Nothing can be more beautiful or more important, and it just contains these few words:  ‘Do unto others as ye would that others should do unto you.’  Now keep this precept in mind, all of you, for ye canna misunderstand it.  But, just to make the thing clear—­

“Never mind the cat, Thora; just pay attention to the lesson—­

“Just to make the thing clear, let us suppose an example.  Now, then, supposin’, for instance, that Thora here saw a basin full o’ milk with thick cream on the top o’ it, and that her teeth were watering for just one lick.  She ought to say to herself:  ’Now, here’s a basin full o’ good cream; I’d like fine to take one lick of it.  But it’s the cream for making the butter of.  Now, supposin’ I was your mother, how would I like my daughter Thora to come and—­’”

“Oh!  Look, look!” cried Thora, “pussy’s tail’s burnin’!”

“Confound you, Thora!” exclaimed her father, angered at this interruption.  “Can you not pay attention, and let pussy mind her own tail?  I say, if you were your mother, how would you like your daughter Thora to lick the cream?”

“Tut, goodman!” interposed Mrs. Kinlay, “what does the lass ken about being a mother?  Go on with the reading.”

“Odd, goodwife, I’m but supposin’ the thing; and the plainer it is the better, and the easier to understand.  However, what verse was it, Thora?”