r Ishmael!"

Ishmael nodded. His eyes were fixed on the two of them as they appeared
up the slope--Jim coming in view first, so young and glowing against the
sunlit blue of the sky, so small upon the big powerful horse; then
Nicky, lean and handsome, his grave face lit to mirth, looking, with his
slouch felt hat and bare neck and chest exposed by the loose open shirt
he wore, like some brown god of the harvest--not a young deity of
spring, but the fulfilled presentment of life at the height of
attainment, at harvest.

Yet he had been as young as Jim, would be as old as himself--so thought
Ishmael, with that impotency the watching of the flight of time evokes
in the heart. To Ishmael it seemed such a mere flash as he looked back
to the evening when the Neck had been cried in that field, and he had
thought the moment so vivid it must last for ever. That moment seemed
hardly further ago than when he had first broken his own earth in this
field with his new iron plough. Neither seemed really long ago at
all--time had gone too swiftly for that--yet both seemed very far away,
not set there by period, but by being in another life. What seemed
furthest away of anything was the morning last spring when he had sown
these acres with the dredge-corn now being reaped, and when the figure
of an old man in slaty-grey clothes had paused by the gate and stared
across the farmyard.... Archelaus now lay in six feet of earth, while he
himself still walked free upon these broad acres; and yet--what was it
Archelaus had said? "It'll be I, and not you, who's living on at Cloom;
'tes my flesh and blood'll be there, so 'tes mine, after all...."

How much did that affect it? thought Ishmael now, as he watched for them
to come round once more, and gave a nod and a wave of the hand as they
breasted the slope. It was not, it occurred to him, not for the first
time, but more deeply than ever before, as though Archelaus had been
some stranger. He had built to make Cloom a good place for his
descendants, for his flesh and blood, but the same blood ran in Nicky
whether he or Archelaus had fathered him. Not one jot of it was
different. And this, which to Archelaus, had he been in Ishmael's
position, would have been the sharpest pang--which he had meant to be
the sharpest--was to Ishmael the saving element. For it prevented Cloom
being made in his eyes a thing of no account, the mere vehicle of
strangers. Cloom was more to him than his dislike of Arche