efully, then he threw back his head and
sniffed the air, looking all round the sky meanwhile. Yes, the season
had been late and harsh, but the fine weather was coming at last. Two or
three days' warmth now would ripen even the oats, let alone the wheat.

Well, he was glad. He wanted the harvest over. It would, perhaps, be his
last harvest at Clinton Magna, where he had worked, man and boy, for
fifty-six years come Michaelmas. His last harvest! A curious pleasure
stirred the man's veins as he thought of it, a pleasure in expected
change, which seemed to bring back the pulse of youth, to loosen a
little the yoke of those iron years that had perforce aged and bent him;
though, for sixty-two, he was still hale and strong.

Things had all come together. Here was 'Muster' Hill, the farmer he had
worked for these seventeen years, dying of a sudden, with a carbuncle on
the neck, and the farm to be given up at Michaelmas. He--John
Bolderfield--had been working on for the widow; but, in his opinion, she
was 'nobbut a caselty sort of body,' and the sooner she and her children
were taken off to Barnet, where they were to live with her mother, the
less she'd cost them as had the looking after her. As for the crops,
they wouldn't pay the debts; not they. And there was no one after the
farm--'nary one'--and didn't seem like to be. That would make another
farm on Muster Forrest's hands. Well, and a good job. Landlords must be
'took down'; and there was plenty of work going on the railway just now
for those that were turned off.

[Illustration: _The Village of Aldbury_]

He was too old for the railway, though, and he might have found it hard
to get fresh work if he had been staying at Clinton. But he was not
staying. Poor Eliza wouldn't last more than a few days; a week or two at
most, and he was not going to keep on the cottage after he'd buried her.

Aye, poor Eliza! She was his sister-in-law, the widow of his second
brother. He had been his brother's lodger during the greater part of his
working life, and since Tom's death he had stayed on with Eliza. She and
he suited each other, and the 'worritin childer' had all gone away years
since and left them in peace. He didn't believe Eliza knew where any of
them were, except Mary, 'married over to Luton'--and Jim, and Jim's
Louisa. And a good riddance too. There was not one of them knew how to
keep a shilling when they'd got one. Still, it was a bit lonesome for
Eliza now, with no one