“That is exactly what I do mean; and that is why I have watched for you so. I have no intention of knocking under. And so he will find out in the end; and somebody else, I hope, as well. Everybody thinks I am such a fool, because I am easy-tempered. Let them wait a bit. They may be proud of that never-do-well, silly Hilary yet. In the last few months, I can assure you, I have been through things--however, I won’t talk about them. They never did understand me at home; and I suppose they never will. But it does not matter. Wait a bit.” “Darling Hilary! don’t talk so. It makes me ready to cry to hear you. You will go into some battle, and throw your life away, to spite all of us.” “No, no, I won’t. Though it would serve you right for considering me such a nincompoop. As if the best, and sweetest, and truest-hearted girl in the universe was below contempt, because her father happens to grow cabbages! What do we grow? Corn, and hay, and sting-nettles, and couch-grass. Or at least our tenants grow them for us, and so we get the money. Well, how are they finer than cabbages?” “Come in and see father,” said Alice, straining her self-control to shun argument. “Do come, and see him before you go.” “I will not,” he answered, amazing his sister by his new-born persistency. “He never has asked me; and I will not do it.” No tears, no sobs, no coaxings moved him; his troubles had given him strength of will; and he went to the war without seeing his father. CHAPTER XXXIII. RAGS AND BONES. One man there is, or was, who ought to have been brought forward long ago. Everybody said the same thing of him--he wanted nothing more than the power of insisting upon his reputation, and of checking his own bashfulness, to make him one of the foremost men anywhere in or near Steyning. His name was Bottler, as everybody knew; and through some hereditary veins of thought, they always added “the pigman”--as if he were a porcine hybrid! He was nothing of the sort. He was only a man who stuck pigs, when they wanted sticking; and if at such times he showed humanity, how could that identify him with the animal between his knees? He was sensitive upon this point at times, and had been known to say, “I am no pigman; what I am is a master pork-butcher.” However, he could not get over his name, any more than anybody else can. And if such a trifle hurt his feelings, he scarcely insisted upon them, until he was getting quite into his fifth quart of ale, and discovering his true value.