Grannie’s reputation as a story-teller was readily acknowledged by the children of our village.  When they had trudged back from school which was held in a village two miles away, tea was always ready for them.  But tea in their own kitchens was accounted a dull repast.  If the weather was fine they carried their “shives” of bread and dripping, or bread and treacle, into the road in front of their houses and ate them in the intervals between “Here come three dukes a-riding,” “Wallflowers, wallflowers, growing up so high,” and “Poor Roger is dead and laid in his grave.”  But in winter, or when the weather was bad, they made it their custom to take their teas to Grannie’s fireside and demand a story as accompaniment to their frugal meal.  The young voices of the children brightened Grannie’s life, and the hour of story-telling round the fire was for her like a golden sunset following upon a day of gloom.

The stories which she told to the children were usually concerned with her own childhood.  She had always been of an imaginative turn of mind and the doings of her early life, seen through the long-drawn vistas of the years, had become suffused with iridescent colours.  They had gathered to themselves romance as a wall overhung by trees gathers to itself moss and fern and lichen.

“Tell you a tale,” she would say.  “Ay, but, honey-barns, I reckon you’ll have heerd all my tales lang sin.  No?  Well then, did I iver tell you t’ tale o’ Janet’s Cove?”

“Ay, thou’s telled us yon last week,” Kester Laycock, the spokesman of the party of listeners, would reply; “but thou mun tell it agean.”

There was diplomacy as well as truth in Kester’s words when he said that Grannie had told them the story of Janet’s Cove the preceding week.  The truth was that she had told them that tale every week since winter set in, but nothing could stale its freshness for them.  Besides, did not Grannie introduce surprising variations of narrative every time she told it, so that it never seemed quite the same story?

“Janet’s Cove” was a story of the birds, and Grannie’s knowledge of the life and habits of birds seemed wonderful to them.  Crippled with rheumatism as she was, and unable to move from her bed, she nevertheless watched for the return of the spring and autumn migrants with all the eagerness of the born naturalist.  She offered the children money if they would bring her the first tidings of the arrival of birds in the dale.  There was always a halfpenny underneath the geranium pot in the window-sill for the child whose eye caught sight of the first swallow, redstart or sandpiper; or whose ear first recognised the clarion call of the cuckoo, or the evening “bleat” of the nightjar on the bracken-mantled fells at the end of May.  Or, if the season were autumn, the children were told to watch for the arrival of the woodcock and the earliest flock of Norwegian fieldfares.  Under Grannie’s tuition more than one generation in the village had learnt to take an interest in the movements of migrants in the dale, and that was why the story of Janet and the birds never failed to charm the ears of the children gathered round the kitchen hearth.