have
been nearer eighty than seventy years since is known, however, to the
elderly farmers, who recollect him as a man with a family when they were
young. The thatched cottage stood beside the road at one end of a long,
narrow garden, enclosed from the highway by a hedge of elder. At the back
there was a ditch and mound with elm-trees, and green meadows beyond. A
few poles used to lean against the thatch, their tops rising above the
ridge, and close by was a stack of thorn faggots. In the garden three or
four aged and mossgrown apple-trees stood among the little plots of
potatoes, and as many plum-trees in the elder hedge. One tall pear-tree
with scored bark grew near the end of the cottage; it bore a large crop of
pears, which were often admired by the people who came along the road, but
were really hard and woody. As a child he played in the ditch and hedge,
or crept through into the meadow and searched in the spring for violets to
offer to the passers-by; or he swung on the gate in the lane and held it
open for the farmers in their gigs, in hope of a halfpenny.

As a lad he went forth with his father to work in the fields, and came
home to the cabbage boiled for the evening meal. It was not a very roomy
or commodious home to return to after so many hours in the field, exposed
to rain and wind, to snow, or summer sun. The stones of the floor were
uneven, and did not fit at the edges. There was a beam across the low
ceiling, to avoid which, as he grew older, he had to bow his head when
crossing the apartment. A wooden ladder, or steps, not a staircase proper,
behind the whitewashed partition, led to the bedroom. The steps were
worm-eaten and worn. In the sitting-room the narrow panes of the small
window were so overgrown with woodbine as to admit but little light. But
in summer the door was wide open, and the light and the soft air came in.
The thick walls and thatch kept it warm and cosy in winter, when they
gathered round the fire. Every day in his manhood he went out to the
field; every item, as it were, of life centred in that little cottage. In
time he came to occupy it with his own wife, and his children in their
turn crept through the hedge, or swung upon the gate. They grew up, and
one by one went away, till at last he was left alone.

He had not taken much conscious note of the changing aspect of the scene
around him. The violets flowered year after year; still he went to plough.
The May bloomed and scented t