“I feel sure,” said Mrs Bosenna, “you and he would have found many things in common, had he been spared. . .  Now, I dare say, you’d like to look around the place a bit before dinner.  Where shall we begin?  With the live stock?”

“As you please, ma’am.”

“Well, as we’re to eat sucking-pig, we’ll go and have a look at the litter he was one of; and then we’ll take the cows; and then you’ll have to excuse me for a few minutes while I attend to the apple-sauce, about which I’m very particular.”

They visited the sow and her farrows—­a family group which Captain Cai pronounced to be “very comfortable-lookin’.”

“But how stupid of me!” exclaimed Mrs Bosenna.  “To forget that you sailors are tired to death with pork!”

“Not with this variety, ma’am,” Captain Cai assured her.

They passed on to the cow-houses, which were empty just then, but nevertheless worth visiting, being brick-floored, well-ventilated, and roomy, with straw generously spread in the stalls, fresh and ready for the cattle’s return.  There were two houses, one for Jerseys (as Mrs Bosenna explained), the other for Devons; and she drew his attention to their drainage system.  “If I had my way, every cow in the land should be as cleanly lodged as a cottager.  None of your infected milk for me!”

From the cow-houses she conducted him through the mowhay, where the number and amplitude of the ricks fairly took his breath away.  “Oh, we call Rilla quite a small farm!” said Mrs Bosenna carelessly.  “But I could never endure to be short of straw.  Clean bedding is a craze with me.”  She halted and invited him to admire some details in the thatching—­the work of an old man past seventy, she told him, and sighed.  “Thatching’s a lost art, almost.  Too much education nowadays, and everybody in a hurry—­that’s what’s the matter. . . .  In a few years we shall all be thatching with corrugated iron.”

“An’ by that time every one will be in steam.”

“Eh?”

“Shipping, ma’am.”

“Ah, yes—­to be sure.  And everybody making butter with a County Council separator.  ‘All very scientific,’ I tell them, ’so long as you don’t ask me to eat it!’ Why, look at this!” Captain Cai looked.  She was holding out her hand palm uppermost, and a very pretty, plump hand it was to be sure.

“I should be sorry to say how many hundredweights of butter I’ve made wi’ that very hand—­or how many hundreds of persons have eaten it.”

Captain Cai dived his own hands into the hip-pockets of his new coat, aimlessly searching for pipe and tobacco-pouch; not that he would have ventured to smoke in her presence!—­but it gave his hands something to do.

“‘Glad,’ I think you must mean, ma’am,” said he slowly.

She laughed.  “If you’re going to make pretty speeches, it’s time for me to run indoors,” and she left him with a warning that dinner would be ready in ten minutes, or at one o’clock to the tick.