got to go in."

Others, going by, chaffed him. "You bin there all night, then?"

About a quarter past six he went back home, and met his neighbour Noah.

"Hullo!" says Noah. "What? You bin at work?"

"Ah, and so you ought to ha' bin."

But Noah, who has lived in London, "sits up till eleven or twelve at night readin' the paper. He can't git into the habit of gettin' up early."

Gardening talk is now the staple conversation in the village, and the public-house is the club-room where the discussions take place, the times being Saturday night and Sunday.

"You don't find many there any other time," says Bettesworth. "Cert'nly, after a man bin to work all day, when he gits home he's tired, and wants to go to bed. But Saturday night and Sunday—well, you can't bide indoors solitary, lookin' at the fire. If you do, you never learns nothin'. But to go and have a glass and a pipe where there's others—that sims to enlighten your mind."

The men compare notes, and give and take sage advice. "Where I had that crop o' dwarf peas last year I be goin' to have carrots this," says one. Another answers, "Well, then, if I was you, I should dig that ground up now—rake off the stones" (carrots being "a very tender herbage"). "Then, if it comes rain, that'll settle it a bit. After that, let it bide an' settle for about another fortnight, and then as soon as you gets a shower shove 'em in as fast as you mind."

"Or else," Bettesworth explains in telling me this, "if you don't let it settle the drill sows 'em too deep; it sinks in. Carrots is a thing you wants to sow as shallow as ever you can."

Somebody informs the company that he had "quarter of a acre o' carrots last year, and he made five pound of 'em." Or was it that he had five tons, and sold them for thirty shillings a ton? This was it, as Bettesworth at last remembers.

"I 'spose you'll soon be puttin' in some taters, Fred?"

"I got most o' mine in a'ready."

"Have ye? I en't sowed none yet, but...."

So says Tom Durrant, the landlord.

"But cert'nly," as Bettesworth observes, "down there where he is it do take the frost so—right over there in Moorway's Bottom. Up here, though, we no call to wait. I likes to git taters in. You see, where they lays about they spears so, and then the spears gits knocked off—you can't help it; or, if not, still, where you sees a tater speared so, that must weaken that tater? About two foot two one way and fifteen inches t'other—that's the distance I gen'ly plants taters. Ten't no good leavin' 'em wider 'tween the rows. But old Steve Blackman, up there by the Forest, I knowed he once plant some three foot both ways. And law, what a crop he did git! 'Twas a piece o' ground his landlord let 'n have for the breakin' of it up. And he trenched in a lot o' fuzz—old fuzz-bushes as high as you be—and so on. Everything went in. And such a crop o' taters as he had—no, no dressin'. Only this old fuzz-stuff. Regents, they was. Oh, that was a splendid tater, too! But you never hears of 'em now. They sims to be reg'lar gone out. I got some o' these here Dunbars, down here. I should like to see half a bushel o' they in this bit o' ground o' yourn. Splendid croppin' tater they be. I ast Tom Durrant if he could spare you half a bushel. He said he didn't hardly know. There's so many bin after 'em—purty near half the parish. They be a splendid croppin' tater, no mistake. He got 'em of some gentleman's gardener to begin with, I reckon. Reg'lar one he is, you know, for gettin' taters an' things, and markin' 'em and keepin' the sorts separate. He had four to start with, an' they produced a peck. Then he got three bushel out o' that peck. And last year he sowed 'em again—three bushel—and he got thirty-nine bushel."

II

May 13, 1896.—The Tom Durrant just mentioned was frequently spoken of by Bettesworth, and always in a tone of warm approval. "A wonderful quiet sort o' man," steadily "putting together the pieces," but not assuming any airs, he managed his public-house well, and with especial attention to the comfort of his older neighbours. "If any of the young uns come in hollerin' about, 'twas very soon 'Outside!' with Tom. 'There is the door!' he'd say. 'I don't keep my 'ouse open for such as you.'"

So Bettesworth has told me, more than once—perhaps not exactly in those words.

But sometimes Bettesworth's talk was too thick with detail to be remembered and written down as he said it in the time at my disposal; whence it happens that I am able only to summarize an anecdote about Durrant, which Bettesworth told with considerable relish. The publican was the owner of two cottages which were supplied with water from a good well—a precious thing in this village. These cottages had lately been overhauled and enlarged—Bettesworth detailed to me all the improvements, praising the new sculleries and sheds that had been added—and then the tenants, as if stricken with madness, found fault with the water-supply, and lodged a complaint with the sanitary inspector. The inspector insisted that the well should be cleaned out. Durrant thereupon examined the water, found it "clear as crystal," cleaned out the well as he was ordered to do, and—gave the tenants notice to pay sixpence a week more for their cottages, or to quit. "So they didn't get much by that," said Bettesworth approvingly.

After all, this was but a kind of parenthesis in a talk which, not hurried, but quietly oozing out as we worked side by side in the garden, fairly overwhelmed my memory with variety of subject and vividness of expression. At one time it dealt with a certain road which was to be widened—"all they beautiful trees to be cut down, right from so-and-so to so-and-so"; at another, it discussed three parcels of building land for sale in the vicinity, estimated their acreage, and related the offers which had been already made for them. From that, working all the while, Bettesworth would wander off to the drought, and I would hear how long this or that neighbour had been without water; how a third (whose new horse, by the way, "was turnin' out well—but there, so do all they that comes from" a certain source, where, however, "they works 'em too hard")—how a third neighbour was obliged to keep his old horse almost constantly at work fetching water, since he had twenty-two little pigs, besides other live animals whose numbers goodness knows, and so did Bettesworth. At the new schools, again, the water was failing; and how, and why, and what the caretaker thought, and all about it, Bettesworth was able to explain.

The receptivity of the man's brain was what struck me. One pictured it pinked and patterned over with thousands of unsorted facts—legions of them jostling one another without apparent arrangement. Yet all were available to him; at will he could summon any one of them into his consciousness. A modern man would have had to stop and sift and compare them, and build theories and systems out of all that wealth of material. Not being modern, Bettesworth did not theorize; his thoughts were like the dust-atoms seen in a sunbeam. But though he did not "think," still a vast common-sense somehow or other flourished in him, and these manifold facts were its food.

September 26, 1896.—Nor was it only of current topics that he could talk with such fullness of detail. Getting shortly afterwards into the reminiscent vein, he succeeded in paralyzing my memory with the tale of things he had observed many years before in just the same unsystematic yet thorough fashion. My hasty jottings, made afterwards, preserve only a few points, and do not tell how any of them were suggested. The talk was at one time of