Friendly Brook

(March 1914)

The valley was so choked with fog that one could scarcely see a cow's
length across a field. Every blade, twig, bracken-frond, and hoof-print
carried water, and the air was filled with the noise of rushing ditches
and field-drains, all delivering to the brook below. A week's November
rain on water-logged land had gorged her to full flood, and she
proclaimed it aloud.

Two men in sackcloth aprons were considering an untrimmed hedge that ran
down the hillside and disappeared into mist beside those roarings. They
stood back and took stock of the neglected growth, tapped an elbow of
hedge-oak here, a mossed beech-stub there, swayed a stooled ash back and
forth, and looked at each other.

'I reckon she's about two rod thick,' said Jabez the younger, 'an' she
hasn't felt iron since--when has she, Jesse?'

'Call it twenty-five year, Jabez, an' you won't be far out.'

'Umm!' Jabez rubbed his wet handbill on his wetter coat-sleeve. 'She
ain't a hedge. She's all manner o' trees. We'll just about have to--' He
paused, as professional etiquette required.

'Just about have to side her up an' see what she'll bear. But hadn't we
best--?' Jesse paused in his turn, both men being artists and equals.

'Get some kind o' line to go by.' Jabez ranged up and down till he found
a thinner place, and with clean snicks of the handbill revealed the
original face of the fence. Jesse took over the dripping stuff as it
fell forward, and, with a grasp and a kick, made it to lie orderly on
the bank till it should be faggoted.

By noon a length of unclean jungle had turned itself into a cattle-proof
barrier, tufted here and there with little plumes of the sacred holly
which no woodman touches without orders.

'Now we've a witness-board to go by!' said Jesse at last.

'She won't be as easy as this all along,' Jabez answered. 'She'll need
plenty stakes and binders when we come to the brook.'

'Well, ain't we plenty?' Jesse pointed to the ragged perspective ahead
of them that plunged downhill into the fog. 'I lay there's a cord an' a
half o' firewood, let alone faggots, 'fore we get anywheres anigh
the brook.'

'The brook's got up a piece since morning,' said Jabez. 'Sounds like's
if she was over Wickenden's door-stones.'

Jesse listened, too. There was a growl in the brook's roar as though she
worried something hard.

'Yes. She's over Wickenden's door-stones,' he replied. 'Now she'll flood
acrost Alder Bay an' that'll ease her.'

'She won't ease Jim Wickenden's hay none if she do,' Jabez grunted. 'I
told Jim he'd set that liddle hay-stack o' his too low down in the
medder. I _told_ him so when he was drawin' the bottom for it.'

'I told him so,