As flower and bird and leaf came and went, so the strong men with whom he had battled in his rude youth flitted away one by one to the meads of asphodel, but did not return in the spring. The carter whom he had partly blinded by a blow from his whip-handle, which injured an eyeball; the plough-boy he rode over and lamed; the fogger whose leg he broke with a kick in the old, old days, when brute force ruled irresponsibly on the wild hills--they slept peacefully under the greensward and the daisy. No more their weary bones would ache in the rain and snow; no more their teeth would grind the hard crust of toil. So, too, the old boon companions dropped away. Squire Thorpe--not the present, but the ancient one of evil days, wild and headstrong--was still enough at last in the vault under the chancel. He could swear and drink no more, nor fight a main of cocks every Sunday afternoon on his dining-room table. With his horny stiffened fingers Andrew could count up the houses in the hamlet at the Warren; there was not one that the hearse had not emptied. The hamlet of his youth had passed away. It is the aged that should see ghosts; there should be a spectre in every chair. The big black horse that carried him in the mad steeplechase at Millbourne--still talked of by the country-side--and in many a run with the Hunt in the vale, lay eight feet deep in the garden, and a damson-tree had grown over him. Ninety times; and the scythe was busy in the grass, and the corn would soon turn colour yet once more. Peggy was dead too--nut-brown Peggy, with her sloe-black eyes, _retroussee_ nose, and mischievous mouth, who had reaped and gleaned and garnered her master's evil passion among convolvulus and poppy. Sweet Peggy, cast aside like the threshed-out straw, crushed, and broken, the light gone out in her eye, had forgotten her misery now the yew dropped its red berries on her resting-place. Fifty guineas, a heavy bribe in those days, the bailiff took to marry her. What a ghastly farce was celebrated that morn before God's holy altar! But the vicar's bulbous lips, that uttered those solemn words and jested, shall dip no more in the rosy wine they loved. He broke his neck when his horse fell at the double mound; but Andrew lives still. Peggy's boy, chained to the plough like a born serf, but full of his real father's fiery spirit, poached and stole, and worse, and at last laid his bones in the Australian gold rush. Ninety times; and yet once more the wheat came on apace.