t
home with.

I could hit the barn-door now capitally well with the Spanish
match-lock, and even with John Fry's blunderbuss, at ten good land-yards
distance, without any rest for my fusil. And what was very wrong of me,
though I did not see it then, I kept John Fry there, to praise my shots,
from dinner-time often until the grey dusk, while he all the time should
have been at work spring-ploughing upon the farm. And for that matter so
should I have been, or at any rate driving the horses; but John was
by no means loath to be there, instead of holding the plough-tail. And
indeed, one of our old sayings is,--

For pleasure's sake I would liefer wet, Than ha' ten lumps of gold for
each one of my sweat.

And again, which is not a bad proverb, though unthrifty and unlike a
Scotsman's,--

God makes the wheat grow greener, While farmer be at his dinner.

And no Devonshire man, or Somerset either (and I belong to both of
them), ever thinks of working harder than God likes to see him.

Nevertheless, I worked hard at the gun, and by the time that I had
sent all the church-roof gutters, so far as I honestly could cut them,
through the red pine-door, I began to long for a better tool that would
make less noise and throw straighter. But the sheep-shearing came and
the hay-season next, and then the harvest of small corn, and the digging
of the root called 'batata' (a new but good thing in our neighbourhood,
which our folk have made into 'taties'), and then the sweating of the
apples, and the turning of the cider-press, and the stacking of the
firewood, and netting of the woodcocks, and the springles to be
minded in the garden and by the hedgerows, where blackbirds hop to the
molehills in the white October mornings, and grey birds come to look for
snails at the time when the sun is rising.

It is wonderful how time runs away, when all these things and a great
many others come in to load him down the hill and prevent him from
stopping to look about. And I for my part can never conceive how people
who live in towns and cities, where neither lambs nor birds are (except
in some shop windows), nor growing corn, nor meadow-grass, nor even so
much as a stick to cut or a stile to climb and sit down upon--how these
poor folk get through their lives without being utterly weary of them,
and dying from pure indolence, is a thing God only knows, if His mercy
allows Him to think of it.

How the year went by I know not, only that I was ab