the body less than its core they knew that it meant snow and in the night the snow came who continued to live at the cottage with the warm that cheered any lonely who paused beside it awoke in the night and heard above the noises which seemed to signify that the roof had turned itself into a of all the of the d winds when she lit her lamp to get up in the morning she found that the snow had blown through a in the forming a white of the finest powder against the inside and had also come down the chimney so that it lay sole deep upon the floor on which her shoes left tracks when she moved about without the storm drove so fast as to create a snow mist in the kitchen but as yet it was too dark out of doors to see anything knew that it was impossible to go on with the and by the time she had breakfast beside the solitary little lamp arrived to tell her that they were to join the rest of the women at reed drawing in the bam till the weather changed as soon therefore as the uniform cloak of darkness without began to turn to a disordered of they blew out the lamp wrapped themselves up in their tied their round their necks and across their and started for the bam the snow had followed the birds from the basin as a white pillar of a and individual could not be seen the blast smelt of seas and white bears the snow so that it licked the land but did not on it they with bodies through the fields keeping as well as they could in the shelter of hedges which however acted as rather than the air afflicted to with the multitudes that it twisted and spun them suggesting an chaos of things but both the young women were fairly cheerful such weather on a dry is not in itself ha ha the cunning northern birds knew this was coming said depend upon t they keep just in front o t all the way from the north star your husband my dear is i make no doubt having weather all this time lord if he could only see his pretty wife now not that this the woman pays weather hurts your beauty at all � in fact it rather does it good you mustn t talk about him to me said severely well but � surely you care for n do you instead of answering with tears in her eyes faced in the direction in which she imagined south america to lie and putting up her lips blew out a passionate kiss upon the snowy wind well well i know you do but my body it is a rum life for a married couple there � i won t say another word well as for the weather it won t hurt us in the wheat bam but reed drawing is fearful hard work � worse than i can stand it because i m stout but you be than i i can t think why should have set ee at it they reached the wheat bam and entered it one end of the long structure was full of com the middle was where the reed drawing was carried on and there had already been placed in the reed press the evening before as many of wheat as would be sufficient for the women to draw from during the day why here s said it was and she came forward she had walked all the way from her mother s home on the previous afternoon and not the distance so great had been arriving however just before the snow b an and sleeping at the ale house the farmer had agreed with her mother at market to take her on if she came to day and she had been afraid to disappoint him by delay in addition to and there were two women from a neighbouring village two sisters whom with a start remembered as dark car the queen of and her the queen of diamonds � those who had tried to fight with her in the midnight quarrel at they showed no recognition of her and possibly had none for they had been under the influence of liquor on that of the d occasion and were only temporary there as here they did all kinds of men s work by preference including well sinking and without any sense of fatigue not reed drawers were they too and looked round upon the other three with some putting on their gloves all set to work in a row in front of the press an formed of two posts connected by a cross beam which the to be drawn from were laid ears outward the beam h g down by pins in the and lowered as the diminished the day hardened in colour the light coming in at the barn doors upwards from the snow instead of downwards from the sky the girls pulled handful after handful from the press but by reason of the presence of the strange women who were and not at first talk of old times as they wished to do presently they heard the muffled tread of a horse and the farmer rode up to the bam door when he had he came close to and remained looking at the side of her face she had not turned at first but his fixed attitude led her to look when she perceived that her employer was the native of from whom she had taken flight on the of his allusion to her history he waited till she had carried the drawn to the piles outside when he said so you be the woman who took my civility in such ill part be drowned if i didn t think you might be as soon 