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Support the Monkey! Tell All your Friends and Teachers |
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Support the Monkey! Tell All your Friends and Teachers |
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151 arm, and not noticing my refusal to obey her, she seemed to find childish diversion in pulling the feathers from the rents she had just made, and ranging them on the sheet according to their different species: her mind had strayed to other associations. “That’s a turkey’s,” she murmured to herself, “and this is a wild duck’s, and this is a pigeon’s. Ah, they put pigeon’s feathers in the pillows--no wonder I couldn’t die! Let me take care to throw it on the floor when I lie down. And here is a moorcock’s; and this--I should know it among a thousand--it’s a lapwing’s. Bonny bird,-- wheeling over our heads in the middle of the moor. It wanted to get to its nest, for the clouds had touched the swells, and it felt rain coming. This feather was picked up from the heath, the bird was not shot; we saw its nest in the winter, full of little skeletons. Heathcliff set a trap over it, and the old ones dare not come. I made him promise he’d never shoot a lapwing after that, and he didn’t. Yes, here are more! Did he shoot my lapwings, Nelly? Are they red, any of them? Let me look.” “Give over with that baby-work!” I interrupted, dragging the pillow away, and turning the holes towards the mattress, for she was removing its contents by handfuls. “Lie down and shut your eyes: you’re wandering. There’s a mess! The down is flying about like snow.” I went here and there collecting it. “I see in you, Nelly,” she continued dreamily, “an aged woman--you have grey hair and bent shoulders. This bed is the fairy cave under Penistone Crag, and you are gathering elf-bolts to hurt our heifers, pretending, while I am near, that they are only locks of wool. That’s what you’ll come to fifty years hence: I know you are not so now. I’m not wandering, you’re mistaken, or else I |
