Joss Hallet called the lodgers together in the yard beneath the south wall, because the yard was the only place in the Hold where a crowd could stand without being counted by somebody holding a pen.
He was a cooper by trade and a bargainer by temperament, and he had kept the yard-book for Osk since the spring, when Osk had been elected headman of Lowgate by the lodgers’ own show of hands and then had gone up to the mill-house to sleep with the flour boys, because he said he could not sleep under a wall that was being measured every hour. Osk did not speak in these yard meetings. He had said he would rather listen from the mill-house window, and Joss had told him to do as he pleased, since a headman who sat in a mill was better than one who sat in a Chamber with nothing to say.
So Joss stood on the upturned cask by the water-butt and looked at the lodgers. There were forty-four of them, counting the children. He had counted them that morning, and then again at the gate, and they had come out the same both times. They stood in their own groups, the way they always did. The cooper’s family stood by the pump. The reed-harvest women stood by the wall, where the shade was. The old men from the lower mill sat on the trough’s rim, and the children ran in and out of the crowd like minnows…
