Questioned about these improvements, she led us through to the back to show us the ground, about half an acre in extent, part of which was used as a paddock for the donkey, and on the other part there were about a dozen rather sickly-looking young fruit trees.  Her husband, she said, had planted the orchard and kept the fence of the paddock in order, and they refused to compensate him!  Then she took us up to the spare room, empty of furniture, the floor thick with dust.  The bed, table, chairs, washhandstand, toilet service—­the things she had been so long struggling to get together, saving her money for months and months, and making so many journeys to the town to buy—­all, all he had taken away and sold for almost nothing!

Then, actually with tears in her eyes, she said that now we knew why she couldn’t take us in—­why she had to seem so unkind.

But we are going to stay, we told her.  It was a very good room; she could surely get a few things to put in it, and in the meantime we would go and forage for provisions to last us till Monday.

It is odd to find how easy it is to get what one wants by simply taking it!  At first she was amazed at our decision, then she was delighted and said she would go out to her neighbours and try to borrow all that was wanted in the way of furniture and bedding.  Then we returned to Mr. Brownjohn’s to buy bread, bacon, and groceries, and he in turn sent us to Mr. Marling for vegetables.  Mr. Marling heard us, and soberly taking up a spade and other implements led us out to his garden and dug us a mess of potatoes while we waited.  In the meantime good Mrs. Flowerdew had not been idle, and we formed the idea that her neighbours must have been her debtors for unnumbered little kindnesses, so eager did they now appear to do her a good turn.  Out of one cottage a woman was seen coming burdened with a big roll of bedding; from others children issued bearing cane chairs, basin and ewer, and so on, and when we next looked into our room we found it swept and scrubbed, mats on the floor, and quite comfortably furnished.

After our meal in the small parlour, which had been given up to us, the family having migrated into the kitchen, we sat for an hour by the open window looking out on the dim forest and saw the moon rise—­a great golden globe above the trees—­and listened to the reeling of the nightjars.  So many were the birds, reeling on all sides, at various distances, that the evening air seemed full of their sounds, far and near, like many low, tremulous, sustained notes blown on reeds, rising and falling, overlapping and mingling.  And presently from the bushes close by, just beyond the weedy, forlorn little “orchard,” sounded the rich, full, throbbing prelude to the nightingale’s song, and that powerful melody that in its purity and brilliance invariably strikes us with surprise seemed to shine out, as it were, against the background of that diffused, mysterious purring of the nightjars, even as the golden disc of the moon shone against and above the darkening skies and dusky woods.