“Well”—and he scratched his head thoughtfully—“doing it like this jest diskerridges of ’em a bit, and isn’t sech a deluge o’ trouble as mooting ’em right out would be.” And with that he promptly dropped thistles, and proceeded to discuss the fiendishness of the Germans. He had a long talk (there wasn’t room for me to say anything), and gave recipes for annihilating completely everything connected with them (excepting thistles; I presume they have some; they deserve a good crop, anyhow), finishing up with— “But thur—what I says about ’em I won’t exackly repeat in yer presence, m’m; for my wife often says to me, ‘It won’t do nobody no pertickler good,’ she says, ‘if you gets yerself shut out o’ Heaven by yer langidge,’ she says, ‘just to spite they Huns, what don’t even _hear_ it!’” For a full two minutes he worked that scythe with real zest, as though onslaughting the enemy. Perhaps his method is right (in regard to thistles, I mean), perhaps it is wrong; I’ve never gone sufficiently deep into the subject to be competent to pass an opinion. But I do know that the larger proportion of handy men who have honoured me with their patronage (though there are conspicuous exceptions) invariably weed on these lines of least resistance, and “jest diskerridge ’em”—though I own it takes a lot to discourage _our_ weeds! * * * * * Not feeling like diskerridging weeds at the moment, I asked Ursula to suggest some occupation for my idle hands, though I didn’t put it like that; I inquired which of the many jobs needing urgent attention I had better tackle next. (It came to the same thing in the end; but instead of advertising my natural indolence, I hoped it would convey an impression that I was rushing pell-mell through an endless succession of tasks.) Ursula was sitting on a pile of logs under a big fir tree inside the orchard gate—oh yes, there are firs in the orchard, and lilacs, and daffodils, and snowdrops, and a huge Wellingtonia, and a trickle of water with forget-me-nots and mint on its brink; we’re not at all particular about classification. She was darning a stocking, and it seemed a lengthy job. Not that there was any large, vulgar gash in the stocking; it was merely suffering from general war-time debility, and was one of those that you can go on and on darning, and still find more thin places to run up and down. Have you ever noticed what a snare a stocking of this description can be? You can sit at it for an hour or so, until it seems easier to go on darning it than to bestir yourself to do anything else. In the end, you haven’t accomplished much, considering the time you’ve been about it, but you have acquired a large dose of the virtuous and exemplary feeling that is always the outcome of stocking-darning. Ursula had got like that, though I wouldn’t have you think I under-estimated her efforts, for it was my apparel she was darning.