Ch. 17: Old Wiltshire Days--continued - Page 2

them a few
pence apiece and give them their meals; so to his farm they went,
returning each evening home. That was her first place, and from that
time on she was a toiler, indoors and out, but mainly in the fields,
till she was past eighty-five;--seventy-five years of hard work--then
less and less as her wonderful strength diminished, and her sons and
daughters were getting grey, until now at the age of ninety-four she
does very little--practically nothing.

In that first place she had a very hard master in the farmer and
overseer. He was known in all the neighbourhood as "Devil Turner," and
even at that time, when farmers had their men under their heel as it
were, he was noted for his savage tyrannical disposition; also for a
curious sardonic humour, which displayed itself in the forms of
punishment he inflicted on the workmen who had the ill-luck to offend
him. The man had to take the punishment, however painful or disgraceful,
without a murmur, or go and starve. Every morning thereafter Joan and
her little brother, aged seven, had to be up in time to get to the farm
at five o'clock in the morning, and if it was raining or snowing or
bitterly cold, so much the worse for them, but they had to be there, for
Devil Turner's bad temper was harder to bear than bad weather. Joan was
a girl of all work, in and out of doors, and, in severe weather, when
there was nothing else for her to do, she would be sent into the fields
to gather flints, the coldest of all tasks for her little hands.

"But what could your little brother, a child of seven, do in such a
place?" I asked.

She laughed when she told me of her little brother's very first day at
the farm. The farmer was, for a devil, considerate, and gave him
something very light for a beginning, which was to scare the birds from
the ricks. "And if they will come back you must catch them," he said,
and left the little fellow to obey the difficult command as he could.
The birds that worried him most were the fowls, for however often he
hunted them away they would come back again. Eventually, he found some
string, with which he made some little loops fastened to sticks, and
these he arranged on a spot of ground he had cleared, scattering a few
grains of corn on it to attract the "birds." By this means he succeeded
in capturing three of the robbers, and when the farmer came round at
noon to see how he was getting on, the little fellow showed him his
captures. "These are not birds," said the farmer, "they are fowls, and
don't you trouble yourself any more about them, but keep your eye on the
sparrows and little birds and rooks and jackdaws that come to pull the
straws out."

That was how he