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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II While now upon the win' do zwell The church-bells' evenen peal, O, Along the bottom, who can tell How touch'd my heart do veel, O. When I o' Zunday nights wi' Jeane Do saunter drough a vield or leane, Where elder-blossoms be a-spread Above the eltrot's milk-white head. William Barnes. IT was the custom of both sections of the Maidment family to dine together every Sunday, alternately at Giles' and Joe's; and on the Sabbath following Reuben's encounter with the fair stranger it fell to Beulah's lot to entertain her cousins. Rosanna was a fairly good cook, and could be trusted to roast the joint, and Beulah herself was enterprising about puddings, it being her pride to vary these with what her elders considered somewhat rash frequency. To-day she had determined to astonish her guests with a gooseberry tart; the gooseberries were forward this season, yet still much too small, according to thrifty local ideas, to be gathered.Abel, the cow-man, had seriously remonstrated with her the evening before, as she flitted among the bushes with her tin can. It be murder to pick 'em now, he had urged, fair murder, that's what it be. I like 'em best wi' the taste o' the wood in em, Beulah had retorted, and had gone on with her task. But somehow the dish was not after all a success; whether she had put in too much water or too little sugar, or because her oven was not hot enough, or because she had not sufficiently rolled the crust, the tart when it came to table proved almost uneatable. The juice had so thoroughly impregnated the rather doughy superstructure that it had fallen away from the egg-cup which was meant to support it, and lay prone in its pallid flabbiness in the midst of the acid concoction beneath ? a concoction which seemed to be ...