Shutting his mouth doggedly, Bettesworth went back to his cottage, to live alone there with his cat. There had been some talk of his going into lodgings; but after all, this was still his home. Should he once give it up, he reasoned, and dispose of his furniture, it would be impossible ever again to form a home of his own, however much he might desire to do so. To live with neighbours might be very well; yet how if he and they should disagree? He would have burnt his boats; he would be unable to resume his independence. Better were it, then, to keep while he still had it a place where he was his own master, and take the risk of being lonely. For some seven weeks after the wife's funeral there is next to nothing to be told of him. I find that I am unable to remember anything about him for that period, unless it was then--and it could not have been much later--that he renewed some of his household goods, and amongst them his mattress, being visited apparently by a wish to regain the character for cleanliness which had been lost in his wife's time. It must have been then also that he first talked of buying muslin for blinds to his windows. It is further certain that he chatted a great deal about his next-door neighbours--the Norrises, mother and son, upon whose society he was now chiefly dependent; but of all this not a syllable remains, nor is there any dimmest picture in my memory of what the old man did, or even how he looked, in those seven weeks. _November 22, 1904._--At the end of them, on a raw morning in November, amid our struggles to heave out of the ground a huge shrub we were transplanting, it was remarkable how strong Bettesworth seemed, because of the cunning use he made of every ounce of force in his experienced old muscles. How to lift, and how to support a weight, were things he knew as excellently as some know how to drive a golf-ball. Nor was my theory quite so good as his experience, for showing where our skids and levers should be placed. It was Bettesworth who got them into the serviceable positions. Something about those skids set us talking of other skidding work, and especially of the extremely tricky business of loading timber on a trolly. "I see a carter once," said Bettesworth, "get three big elm-trees up on to a timber-carriage, with only hisself and the hosses. He put the runnin' chains on and all hisself." "And _that_ takes some doing," I said.