t nodded and picking up his hat and some letters went out. As he walked
down the dale the moon rose above a shadowy fell, touching the opposite
hillside with silver light that reached the fields at the bottom farther
on. Tall pikes of wet hay threw dark shadows across a meadow, and he
heard the roar of a swollen beck. There was too much water in the dale,
but Kit knew something might be done to make farming pay in spite of the
weather. Land that had gone sour might be recovered by draining, and a
bank could be built where the river now and then washed away the crops.
Osborn, however, was poor and extravagant, and his agent's talents were
rather applied to raising rents than improving the soil.

Kit stopped when he got near Allerby, where the dale widens and a cluster
of low white houses stands among old trees. The village glimmered in the
moonlight and beyond it rolling country, dotted by dark woods, ran back
to the sea. A beck plunged down the hillside with a muffled roar, and a
building, half in light and half in shadow, occupied the hollow of the
ghyll. Kit, leaning on the bridge, watched the glistening thread of water
that trickled over the new iron wheel, and noted the raw slate slabs that
had been recently built into the mossy wall. A big traction engine,
neatly covered by a tarpaulin, and a trailer lurry stood in front of the
sliding door.

Osborn had spent some money here, for Allerby mill, with its seed and
chemical manure stores, paid him a higher rent than the best of his small
farms. It was obviously well managed by the tenant, and Kit approved.
Modern machines and methods, although expensive, were good and were
needed in the dale. The trouble was, they sometimes gave the man who
could use them power to rob his poorer neighbors. Kit saw that
concentrated power was often dangerous, and since unorganized, individual
effort was no longer profitable, he knew no cure but cooperation.

Although young, he was seldom rash. Enthusiasm is not common in the bleak
northern dales, whose inhabitants are, for the most part, conservative
and slow. Wind and rain had hardened him and he had inherited a reserved
strength and quietness from ancestors who had braved the storms that
raged about Ashness. Yet the north is not always stern, for now and then
the gray sky breaks, and fell and dale shine in dazzling light and melt
with mystic beauty into passing shade. Kit, like his country, varied in
his moods; sometimes he forgot to