had sometimes sent it a present for itself, and more than once he had found a flower thrust lightly under the strings. It was as much for the fiddle’s sake as for his own that he was going home, because there it would be safe and could sing again on the marsh. He told everybody he met how glad the fiddle was to be going home, and they laughed and nodded and said they were delighted, too. Many a time, they told him, they had missed it when it was gone. Many a time, too, they had heard it down the wind. He checked the trap so often that Bob protested at last, and said it was time they were getting to the farm, so after that he contented himself with a wave and a tremulous hail. He knew his friends by their walk long before they came up, and long before he overtook them by the look of their backs. Men of his particular class saw so many backs—at shows and sales, at market and at work on the land. It was always the backs which told anything at all; the faces were careful not to say too much. Very soon they took on that shut and silent look, as of men who had ceased to ask loud questions of life. It was their backs that betrayed them when they were getting done, or hinted subtly how their banking-accounts stood. He always thought of backs when he thought of a crowd, and in thinking of people he generally thought of crowds. His life, like the lives of most on lonely farms, was divided between crowds and days spent more or less alone. The gossip that kept Marget so busy in the street did not belong to any method of living that he knew. The daily contact with the village and the village thoughts blurred his image of life and obsessed his mind. Here there was no sharp cleft between lonely and full hours, between spaces of silence and the bargaining of the mart. Even collective work, such as harvest or hay, meant little more than just occasional speech. It was not association as Marget knew it, all garrulous mouths and empty, idle hands. And the crowds that he knew were real crowds, not two or three cronies hatless in the street. Many a time he had thought himself back in a crowd, sitting at Marget’s in that upstairs room. Sometimes it was a wrestling-ring he saw, with Bob as conqueror in every round. There he saw again the swinging hype, the showy cross-buttock and the neat back-heel, and shouted with pride when Bob felled his man, and laughed aloud alone in his upstairs room. Marget had once burst in to ask him why he laughed, but he had only stared at her vacantly without reply. It was no use telling her that he was in a crowd, and that if the crowd saw fit to laugh he must laugh as well.... It was good to feel the press of the people all about, and the sun that was so pleasant on the green. The champion’s belt that Bob always wore sent out a flash from each of its silver plates....