problems that each day brought along with it.  Beyond the narrow horizon of their own concerns they rarely looked, and Chagford people, noting the change, declared that life at Newtake was tying their tongues and lining their foreheads.  Will certainly grew more taciturn, less free of advice, perhaps less frank than formerly.  A sort of strangeness shadowed him, and only his mother or his son could dispel it.  The latter soon learnt to understand his father’s many moods, and would laugh or cry, show joy or fear, according to the tune of the man’s voice.

There came an evening in mid-September when Will sat at the open hearth and smoked, with his eyes fixed on a fire of scads.[13] He remained very silent, and Phoebe, busy about a small coat of red cloth, to keep the cold from her little son’s bones during the coming winter, knew that it was not one of her husband’s happiest evenings.  His eyes were looking through the fire and the wall behind it, through the wastes and wildernesses beyond, through the granite hills to the far-away edge of the world, where Fate sat spinning the threads of the lives of his loved ones.  Threads they looked, in his gloomy survey of that night, much deformed with knot and tangle, for the Spinner cared nothing at all about them.  She suffered each to wind heedlessly away; she minded not that they were ugly; she spared no strand of gold or silver from her skein of human happiness to brighten the grey fabric of them.  So it seemed to Will, and his temper chimed with the rough night.  The wind howled and growled down the chimney, uttered many a sudden yell and ghostly moan, struck with claws invisible at the glowing heart of the peat fire, and sent red sparks dancing from a corona of faint blue flame.

[13] Scad = the outer rind of the peat, with ling and grass still adhering to it.

“Winter’s comin’ quick,” said Phoebe, biting her thread.

“Ess, winter’s allus comin’ up here.  The fight begins again so soon as ever ’t is awver—­again and again and again, ‘cordin’ to the workin’ years of a man’s life.  Then he turns on his back for gude an’ all, an’ takes his rest, wheer theer’s no more seasons, nor frost, nor sunshine, in the world under.”

“You’m glumpy, dear heart.  What’s amiss?  What’s crossed ‘e?  Tell me, an’ I lay I’ll find a word to smooth it away.  Nothin’ contrary happened to market?”

“No, no—­awnly my nature.  When the wind’s spelling winter in the chimbley, an’ the yether’s dead again, ‘t is wisht lookin’ forrard.  The airth ‘s allus dyin’, an’ the life of her be that short, an’ grubbing of bare food an’ rent out of her is sour work after many years.  Thank God I’m a hopeful, far-seem’ chap, an’ sound as a bell; but I doan’t make money for all my sweat, that’s the mystery.”

“You will some day.  Luck be gwaine to turn ‘fore long, I hope.  An’ us have got what’s better ’n money, what caan’t be bought.”

“The li’l bwoy?”