Cottage Folk

								

has surely surpassed himself. In his faculty for getting inside the
Eastern mind and showing its queer workings Mr. Kipling stands alone.”



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               An Anglo-Indian Novel by Alice M. Kipling



                      Just Ready, price 3s. 6d.



                          A Pinchbeck Goddess



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                       LONDON: WILLIAM HEINEMANN
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Cottage Folk
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New Six-Shilling

      Novels
On the Face of the Waters

      By F. A. Steel
The Spoils of Poynton

      By Henry James
The Man of Straw

      By Edwin Pugh
Illumination

      By Harold Frederic
McLeod of the Camerons

      By M. Hamilton
Life the Accuser

      By Author of

         “A Superfluous Woman”
Andria

      By Percy White
Below the Salt

      By C. E. Raimond
A Court Intrigue

      By Basil Thomson
Chun Ti-kung

      By Claude A. Rees
London: WM. HEINEMANN

                              Cottage Folk



                                   By

                            Mrs. Comyns Carr

                                 London

                           William Heinemann

                                  1897

All rights reserved
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                               CONTENTS



                                                   Page



               The Hoppers                           1



               A Retrospect                         21



               The Bread-winner                     45



               His Little Maid                      89



               A Farm Tragedy                      133



               A Broken Tryst                      183



               An Only Son                         201



               A Woman’s Wager                     225



               A Ne’er-do-weel                     251

                              THE HOPPERS

                              THE HOPPERS

A dull red sun had just set amid purple storm-clouds behind the Sussex
Downs. Nevertheless the twilight was falling softly beneath a wet west
wind that had made the land full of colour and the sea full of shadow
all day.
From the stubble-field where the “hoppers” were lighting their
camp-fires, one could just see the sea through a dip in the land beneath
the hill where the old farm stood among the ash-trees.
Against the privet hedge that hemmed the road, a girl leaned with her
back to the marsh-land that spread westward from the hollow between the
hills. The half-picked hop-gardens were to right of her, and, to left,
the stubble-field where her comrades were laughing and chattering around