She liked doing it after the confinement of the sick chamber, where
she was not now required by reason of her mother's improvement.
Violent motion relieved thought. The plot of ground was in a high,
dry, open enclosure, where there were forty or fifty such pieces,
and where labour was at its briskest when the hired labour of the
day had ended. Digging began usually at six o'clock and extended
indefinitely into the dusk or moonlight. Just now heaps of dead
weeds and refuse were burning on many of the plots, the dry weather
favouring their combustion.
One fine day Tess and 'Liza-Lu worked on here with their neighbours
till the last rays of the sun smote flat upon the white pegs that
divided the plots. As soon as twilight succeeded to sunset the flare
of the couch-grass and cabbage-stalk fires began to light up the
allotments fitfully, their outlines appearing and disappearing under
the dense smoke as wafted by the wind. When a fire glowed, banks
of smoke, blown level along the ground, would themselves become
illuminated to an opaque lustre, screening the workpeople from one
another; and the meaning of the "pillar of a cloud", which was a wall
by day and a light by night, could be understood.
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