minister preaching his last Sunday's sermon over again at him, and as
Thomasina said, "There'd been little enough luck at Lingborough lately,
that they should wish to scare it away when it came."

And yet the news leaked out gently, and was soon known all through the
neighborhood--as a secret.

"The luck of Lingborough's come back. Lob's lying by the fire!"

He could be heard at his work any night, and several people had seen
him, though this vexed Thomasina, who knew well that the good people do
not like to be watched at their labours.

The cowherd had not been able to resist peeping down through chinks in
the floor of the loft above the barn, where he slept, and one night he
had seen Lob fetching straw for the cowhouse. "A great rough, black
fellow," said he, and he certainly grew bigger and rougher and blacker
every time the cowherd told the tale.

The Lubber-fiend appeared next to a boy who was loitering at a late hour
somewhere near the little ladies' kitchen-garden, and whom he pursued
and pelted with mud till the lad nearly lost his wits with terror. (It
was the same boy who was put in the lock-up in the autumn for stealing
Farmer Mangel's Siberian crabs.)

For this trick, however, the rough elf atoned by leaving three pecks of
newly-gathered fruit in the kitchen the following morning. Never had
there been such a preserving season at Lingborough within the memory of
Thomasina.