Sir Richard Temple was undoubtedly an able man, but he was a complete stranger to the local conditions of the constituency. The villagers of Badsey especially, as well as of other adjoining parishes, were just beginning to retrieve their position, threatened by the collapse of corn-growing and consequent unemployment, by the adoption of market-gardening and fruit-growing. The land, run down and full of weeds and rubbish, had been cut up into allotments and offered to them as tenants, their only choice lying between years of hard work in redeeming its condition or emigration. Many young men chose the latter, and did well in the States of America; but where there was a wife and young children that course was scarcely possible, and the man became an allotment tenant. Passing one of these on a plot full of "squitch," which he was laboriously breaking up with a fork to expose it in big clods to a baking sun, I asked if he had taken it. "Well," said he, "I don't know whether I've taken _it_ or it's taken _me_!" These men, by unceasing labour and self-denial, were just beginning to turn the corner; they had cleaned the land, ameliorated its mechanical condition by application of soot and by deep digging with their beloved forks, and, having discovered how wonderfully asparagus nourished on this deep, rich soil, had planted large areas, as well as plum-trees and other market-garden crops, and the well-merited return was coming in increasingly year by year. Sir Richard Temple did not understand the difference between the small holder, growing corn and ordinary crops in less favoured parts of the countrymen the one hand, and market-gardeners in the Vale of Evesham, with its early climate, splendid soil, and railway connection with huge artisan populations, delivering the produce with punctuality and despatch, on the other. He considered that small holders could not make an economic success where the farmers had failed, and had made his views well known in the constituency, but he did not distinguish between the small holder and the market-gardener. The men of Badsey felt aggrieved, they knew better, and at a meeting he held in the village they gave him a rather noisy hearing, with interruptions such as, "Keep off them steel farks," "Mind them steel farks, Sir Richard," and so on. Sir Richard came to ask for my support and assistance in our village, and, as I was not at home, my wife entertained him in my absence, with tea and wedding-cake. She innocently asked if he had come to canvass me; her straightforward query surprised him, but, after a moment's hesitation, he replied cautiously: "Well, something of that sort."