But sometimes Bettesworth's talk was too thick with detail to be remembered and written down as he said it in the time at my disposal; whence it happens that I am able only to summarize an anecdote about Durrant, which Bettesworth told with considerable relish. The publican was the owner of two cottages which were supplied with water from a good well--a precious thing in this village. These cottages had lately been overhauled and enlarged--Bettesworth detailed to me all the improvements, praising the new sculleries and sheds that had been added--and then the tenants, as if stricken with madness, found fault with the water-supply, and lodged a complaint with the sanitary inspector. The inspector insisted that the well should be cleaned out. Durrant thereupon examined the water, found it "clear as crystal," cleaned out the well as he was ordered to do, and--gave the tenants notice to pay sixpence a week more for their cottages, or to quit. "So they didn't get much by _that_," said Bettesworth approvingly. After all, this was but a kind of parenthesis in a talk which, not hurried, but quietly oozing out as we worked side by side in the garden, fairly overwhelmed my memory with variety of subject and vividness of expression. At one time it dealt with a certain road which was to be widened--"all they beautiful trees to be cut down, right from so-and-so to so-and-so"; at another, it discussed three parcels of building land for sale in the vicinity, estimated their acreage, and related the offers which had been already made for them. From that, working all the while, Bettesworth would wander off to the drought, and I would hear how long this or that neighbour had been without water; how a third (whose new horse, by the way, "was turnin' out well--but there, so do all they that comes from" a certain source, where, however, "they works 'em too hard")--how a third neighbour was obliged to keep his old horse almost constantly at work fetching water, since he had twenty-two little pigs, besides other live animals whose numbers goodness knows, and so did Bettesworth. At the new schools, again, the water was failing; and how, and why, and what the caretaker thought, and all about it, Bettesworth was able to explain. The receptivity of the man's brain was what struck me. One pictured it pinked and patterned over with thousands of unsorted facts--legions of them jostling one another without apparent arrangement. Yet all were available to him; at will he could summon any one of them into his consciousness. A modern man would have had to stop and sift and compare them, and build theories and systems out of all that wealth of material. Not being modern, Bettesworth did not theorize; his thoughts were like the dust-atoms seen in a sunbeam. But though he did not "think," still a vast common-sense somehow or other flourished in him, and these manifold facts were its food.