Bowden farmed about a hundred acres of half and half sort of land, some good, some poor, just under the down. He was a widower, with a mother and an only son. A broad, easy man with a dark round head, a rosy face, and immense capacity for living in the moment. Looking at him you would have said not one in whom things would rankle. But then, to look at a West Countryman you would say so many things that have their lurking negations. He was a native of the natives; his family went back in the parish to times beyond the opening of the register; his ancestors had been churchwardens in remote days. His father, ‘Daddy Bowden,’ an easy-going handsome old fellow and a bit of a rip, had died at ninety. He himself was well over fifty, but had no grey hair as yet. He took life easily, and let his farm off lightly, keeping it nearly all to pasture, with a conservative grin (Bowden was a Liberal) at the outlandish efforts of his neighbour Steer (a Tory) to grow wheat, bring in Frisian stock, and use newfangled machines. Steer had originally come to that part of the country as a gentleman’s bailiff, and this induced a sort of secret contempt in Bowden, whose forefathers in old days had farmed their own land here round about. Bowden’s mother, eighty-eight years old, was a little pocket woman almost past speech, with dark bright eyes and innumerable wrinkles, who sat all day long in any warmth there was, conserving energy. His son Ned, a youth of twenty-four, bullet-headed like all the Bowdens, was of a lighter colour in hair and eyes; and at the moment of history, when Steer shot Bowden’s dog, he was keeping company with Steer’s niece, Molly Winch, who kept house for the confirmed bachelor that Steer was. The other member of Bowden’s household, the girl Pansy, was an orphan, some said born under a rose, who came from the other side of the moor and earned fourteen pounds a year. She kept to herself, had dark fine hair, grey eyes, a pale broad face; ‘broody’ she was, given somewhat to the ‘tantrums’; now she would look quite plain; then, when moved or excited, quite pretty. Hers was all the housework, and much of the poultry-feeding, wood-cutting and water-drawing. She was hard worked and often sullen because of it.