In the room from which this cheerful blaze proceeded, he beheld a girl
seated on a willow chair, and busily occupied by the light of the fire,
which was ample and of wood. With a bill-hook in one hand and a
leather glove, much too large for her, on the other, she was making
spars, such as are used by thatchers, with great rapidity. She wore a
leather apron for this purpose, which was also much too large for her
figure. On her left hand lay a bundle of the straight, smooth sticks
called spar-gads--the raw material of her manufacture; on her right, a
heap of chips and ends--the refuse--with which the fire was maintained;
in front, a pile of the finished articles. To produce them she took up
each gad, looked critically at it from end to end, cut it to length,
split it into four, and sharpened each of the quarters with dexterous
blows, which brought it to a triangular point precisely resembling that
of a bayonet.
Beside her, in case she might require more light, a brass candlestick
stood on a little round table, curiously formed of an old coffin-stool,
with a deal top nailed on, the white surface of the latter contrasting
oddly with the black carved oak of the substructure. The social
position of the household in the past was almost as definitively shown
by the presence of this article as that of an esquire or nobleman by
his old helmets or shields. It had been customary for every well-to-do
villager, whose tenure was by copy of court-roll, or in any way more
permanent than that of the mere cotter, to keep a pair of these stools
for the use of his own dead; but for the last generation or two a
feeling of cui bono had led to the discontinuance of the custom, and
the stools were frequently made use of in the manner described.
The young woman laid down the bill-hook for a moment and examined the
palm of her right hand, which, unlike the other, was ungloved, and
showed little hardness or roughness about it. The palm was red and
blistering, as if this present occupation were not frequent enough with
her to subdue it to what it worked in. As with so many right hands
born to manual labor, there was nothing in its fundamental shape to
bear out the physiological conventionalism that gradations of birth,
gentle or mean, show themselves primarily in the form of this member.
Nothing but a cast of the die of destiny had decided that the girl
should handle the tool; and the fingers which clasped the heavy ash
haft might have skilfully guided the pencil or swept the string, had
they only been set to do it in good time.