No sign of occult art is to be seen, unless the bundles of
dried herbs hanging to the rack and in the ingle and the row of labelled
phials on one of the shelves betoken it.
Tom played about with some kittens who occupied the hearth, and with a
goat who walked demurely in at the open door--while their host and Benjy
spread the table for dinner--and was soon engaged in conflict with the
cold meat, to which he did much honour. The two old men's talk was of
old comrades and their deeds, mute inglorious Miltons of the Vale, and
of the doings thirty years back, which didn't interest him much, except
when they spoke of the making of the canal; and then indeed he began to
listen with all his ears, and learned, to his no small wonder, that his
dear and wonderful canal had not been there always--was not, in fact,
so old as Benjy or Farmer Ives, which caused a strange commotion in his
small brain.
After dinner Benjy called attention to a wart which Tom had on the
knuckles of his hand, and which the family doctor had been trying his
skill on without success, and begged the farmer to charm it away. Farmer
Ives looked at it, muttered something or another over it, and cut
some notches in a short stick, which he handed to Benjy, giving him
instructions for cutting it down on certain days, and cautioning Tom not
to meddle with the wart for a fortnight.
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