“She’s so awid to do it,” he said basely to Elspeth, “that we needna let on how much we want it done.”  And he also mentioned her eagerness to Aaron as a reason why she should be allowed to do it for nothing.

For Aaron to hold out against her admittance would have been to defraud himself, for she transformed his house.  When she saw the brass lining of the jelly-pan discolored, and that the stockings hanging from the string beneath the mantelpiece had given way where the wearers were hardest on them; when she found dripping adhering to a cold frying-pan instead of in a “pig,” and the pitcher leaking and the carrot-grater stopped—­when these and similar discoveries were made by Grizel, was it a squeal of horror she gave that such things should be, or a cry of rapture because to her had fallen the task of setting them right?

“She just made a jump for the besom,” was Tommy’s graphic description of how it all began.

You should have seen Grizel on the hoddy-table knocking nails into the wall.  The hoddy-table is so called because it goes beneath the larger one at night, like a chicken under its mother, and Grizel, with the nails in her mouth, used them up so quickly that you would have sworn she swallowed half of them; yet she rocked her arms because she could not be at all four walls at once.  She rushed about the room until she was dizzy, and Tommy knew the moment to cry “Grip her, she’ll tumble!” when he and Elspeth seized her and put her on a stool.

It is on the hoddy-table that you bake and iron.  “There’s not a baking-board in the house,” Elspeth explained.  “There is!” cried Grizel, there and then converting a drawer into one.

Between her big bannocks she made baby ones, for no better reason than that she was so fond of babies, and she kissed the baby ones and said, “Oh, the loves, they are just sweet!” and she felt for them when Tommy took a bite.  She could go so quickly between the board and the girdle that she was always at one end of the course or the other, but never gave you time to say at which end, and on the limited space round the fire she could balance such a number of bannocks that they were as much a wonder as the Lord’s prayer written on a sixpence.  Such a vigilant eye she kept on them, too, that they dared not fall.  Yet she had never been taught to bake; a good-natured neighbor had now and again allowed her to look on.

Then her ironing!  Even Aaron opened his mouth on this subject, Blinder being his confidant.  “I thought there was a smell o’ burning,” he said, “and so I went butt the house; but man, as soon as my een lighted on her I minded of my mother at the same job.  The crittur was so busy with her work that she looked as if, though the last trumpet had blawn, she would just have cried, ‘I canna come till my ironing’s done!’ Ay, I went ben without a word.”