The following spring Naomi gave birth to twin boys. With these twins really started the epic of her maternity. She was not to be one of those women for whom motherhood is a little song of baby shoes and blue sashes, and games and kisses and rockings to sleep. Hers was altogether a sterner business, her part in a battleit was motherhood for a definite purpose, man and woman taking a leaf out of nature's book, playing her game to their own advantage, using her methods only to crush her at last. In a word it was epicand the one drawback was that Naomi had never been meant for an epic part in life. She of all women had been meant for baby shoes and blue sashes, and here she was with her shoulder against Reuben's, helping him in the battle which even he found hard....She took him through "The Woodpecker Tapping," "Dearest Ellen," "I'd mourn the hopes that leave me," "The Song of Seth's House," and "The Blue Bells of Scotland." Each one of them was torment to her gentle heart, as it woke memory after memory of courtshipon the gorse-slopes of Boarzell, among the chasing shadows of Iden Wood, on the Rother marshes by Thornsdale, where the river slinks up from the Fivewatering ... or in this very kitchen here, where the three of them, divided from one another by dizzy gaps of suffering, desire and darkness, were gathered together in a horrible false association."Oh Lord!" wailed Ditch"Oh Lord!""Come, Naomi, put her down. It's bad for you to carry her about like this.""Vale!"Hitherto any verse that had been written in the controversy had been meant for street singing, and turned out in the less serious moments of politicians who certainly were not poets. But "MacDonald's Gate" impressed the multitude as something altogether different. The sounding periods and the number of capitals proclaimed it poetry of the very highest order, and its prominent position throughout the town soon resulted in the collection of excited groups all discussing the Scott's Float toll-gate, which nobody hitherto had thought much about."Calverley, the fiend!" interrupted the smith, fiercely. "If I could only give that beggar's vagabond a sample of what this hand could do, I think I should take a good night's restand that's what I have not done since the night they gave me a lodging in the castle dungeon; and you say that Calverley has put him in prison? Now, I tell you what, Tom Merritt," continued Turner, "if there be a drop of man's blood in your body, they shan't keep him there."