“But I’m not amusing you,” says Annie, regretfully.  “If only it would leave off raining we might go out and have a ride on the tin-tan.”  It takes me some little time, and a closely-knit series of questions, to discover that tin-tan is Southshire for see-saw; and I think how Catherine would laugh at the spectacle of my bobbing up and down on one end of a plank and this little country damsel at the other.  Her detestable laughter; but, thank Heaven!  I need never suffer from it again.

April 8.—­Gloomy again to-day.  Ink-coloured rain clouds hanging close over the hills, their fringe-like lower edges showing ragged across a pale sky, against which the hills themselves rise dark and sharp.  Now and again a shower of rain falls, but not energetically; the wind blows, the clouds shift, the rain ceases, and the sky darkens or gleams with a watery brightness alternately.  Looking over the wide landscape and leaden sea, here and there a patch of sunshine falls, while I myself walk in gloom; now the sails of a ship catch the radiance, now a farmstead, now a strip of sand over by Windle Flats.

I feel slightly bored.  Annie went into Rexingham this morning with Robert and the early milk cart.  She is to spend the day with an aunt, and return with the empty cart this evening.  Twice a day the Andersons send in their milk to Rexingham, and winter and summer son Robert must rise at 3 a.m. to see to the milking, harness Dolly or Dobbin, and jog off his seven miles.  Seven miles there, and seven miles back, morning and evening; that is twenty-eight miles in all, and ever the self-same bit of road in every weather.  So that a farmer’s life has its seamy side also.  But then, to get back of a night!  To find a good little wife like Annie waiting for you at the upper gate or by the house door.  To eat your supper and smoke your pipe, with your feet on the mantel-piece if you pleased, and no possibility of being ordered into dress clothes to go to some vile theatre or idiotic dance—­above all, to know that Catherine knew you were perfectly happy without her—­by the bye, I wonder she has not written to me!  Not that I want her to, of course.  This would entail a few frozen conventional lines back by way of answer.  But I am surprised she can endure thus easily the neglect of even the most insignificant of her subjects.  I felt sure she would write to ask why I did not call on Sunday.  She trusts, no doubt, to the greatness of my folly to bring me again, unasked, to her feet.  Her confidence is for once misplaced.

April 9.—­A great improvement in the weather.  I was awakened by the sun pouring in at my window, and looked out on to a light, bright blue sky, full of white cumuli that cast down purple shadows upon a grey-green sea.  I draped myself in the white dimity window curtain, and watched Annie making her way up between the lettuce rows, with her hands full of primroses.  She came from the orchard, where the green tussucked grass at the foot of the apple trees is starred with these lovely little flowers.