Chapter 17 - Page 2

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."

But best of all was to see Grizel "redding up" on a Saturday afternoon.
Where were Tommy and Elspeth then? They were shut up in the coffin-bed
to be out of the way, and could scarce have told whether they fled
thither or were wrapped into it by her energetic arms. Even Aaron dared
not cross the floor until it was sanded. "I believe," he said, trying to
jest, "you would like to shut me up in the bed too!" "I should just love
it," she cried, eagerly; "will you go?" It is an inferior woman who has
a sense of humor when there is a besom in her hand.

Thus began great days to Grizel, "sweet" she called them, for she had
many of her