He lit his pipe with the scientific accuracy of a smoker of sixty years’ standing, and shook his head solemnly as he regarded his altered birthplace. Then his colour heightened and his dim eye flashed. “It’s the people about ’ere ’as changed more than the place ’as,” he said, with sudden fierceness; “there’s a set o’ men about here nowadays as are no good to anybody; reg’lar raskels. And if you’ve the mind to listen I can tell you of one or two as couldn’t be beat in London itself. “There’s Tom Adams for one. He went and started wot ’e called a Benevolent Club. Threepence a week each we paid agin sickness or accident, and Tom was secretary. Three weeks arter the club was started he caught a chill and was laid up for a month. He got back to work a week, and then ’e sprained something in ’is leg; and arter that was well ’is inside went wrong. We didn’t think much of it at first, not understanding figures; but at the end o’ six months the club hadn’t got a farthing, and they was in Tom’s debt one pound seventeen-and-six. “He isn’t the only one o’ that sort in the place, either. There was Herbert Richardson. He went to town, and came back with the idea of a Goose Club for Christmas. We paid twopence a week into that for pretty near ten months, and then Herbert went back to town agin, and all we ’ear of ’im, through his sister, is that he’s still there and doing well, and don’t know when he’ll be back. “But the artfullest and worst man in this place—and that’s saying a good deal, mind you—is Bob Pretty. Deep is no word for ’im. There’s no way of being up to ’im. It’s through ’im that we lost our Flower Show; and, if you’d like to ’ear the rights o’ that, I don’t suppose there’s anybody in this place as knows as much about it as I do—barring Bob hisself that is, but ’e wouldn’t tell it to you as plain as I can. “We’d only ’ad the Flower Show one year, and little anybody thought that the next one was to be the last. The first year you might smell the place a mile off in the summer, and on the day of the show people came from a long way round, and brought money to spend at the Cauliflower and other places. “It was started just after we got our new parson, and Mrs. Pawlett, the parson’s wife, ’is name being Pawlett, thought as she’d encourage men to love their ’omes and be better ’usbands by giving a prize every year for the best cottage garden. Three pounds was the prize, and a metal tea-pot with writing on it. “As I said, we only ’ad it two years. The fust year the garden as got it was a picter, and Bill Chambers, ’im as won the prize, used to say as ’e was out o’ pocket by it, taking ’is time and the money ’e spent on flowers. Not as we believed that, you understand, ’specially as Bill did ’is very best to get it the next year, too. ’E didn’t get it, and though p’r’aps most of us was glad ’e didn’t, we was all very surprised at the way it turned out in the end.