The themes might be trivial, yet the talk was not ignoble. The rippling comments upon their affairs, which swing in perpetual ebb and flow amidst the labouring people, lead them perhaps no farther; and yet, should they not be said? Could they be dispensed with? Are they not an integral part of life? Let me quote another fragment: "After that rain yesterday, old Kid says, up in that clay at Waterman's when you takes your spud out o' the ground you can't see whether 'tis a spud or a board. And it's enough to break your shoulders all to pieces. He _was_ tired last night, he says." Well--to me the observation justifies itself, and I like it for its own sake. It touched me with an elusive vitality of its own, for which after our turf-laying I began generally to listen in Bettesworth's talk, and which nowadays I hear in that of his neighbours, as when old Nanny Norris meets me on the road and stops for a gossip. XXX Christmas was approaching near--was "buckin' up," as Bettesworth quaintly phrased it; and that it contributed to the melancholy of his existence will easily be understood. It is nowhere mentioned in my book, but a remorse was beginning to haunt him, for having let his wife be taken away to the infirmary, to die there. "I done it for the best, poor old dear," I remember his saying several times; "but it hurts me to think I let her go." In the long evenings before Christmas, alone in his cottage and unable to pass time by reading, he had too much time for brooding over his loss. The nights as well as the evenings were probably too long for him, and I make no question that his happiest hours were those he spent at work, when he could forget himself and still talk cheerfully. Thus there is quite a gleam of cheerfulness in the following instructive fragment, of the 17th of December. _December 17, 1904._--"When the wind blowed up in the night I thought 'twas rain. I got out an' went to the winder--law! _'twas_ dark! But the winder an' all seemed as dry!" "What time was that?" "I DUNNO, sir." "The moon must have been down?" "Yes, the moon was down." "Then it must have been getting on for morning." "I dunno.... But I'd smoked two pipes o' baccer before Kid called me. I _have_ smoked some baccer since I bin livin' there alone. The last half-pound I had is purty well all gone; and 'tent the day for another lot afore Monday." (This was Saturday.) "But I shall ha' to get me some more to-night. Why, that's quarter of a pound a week! "Old Kid says, 'Don't it make ye _dry_?' this smoking. 'No,' I says, 'that" (namely, to drink) "en't no good.' Kid don't smoke. Reg'lar old-fashioned card, he is. 'Ten't many _young_ men you'll see like 'n. But he's as reg'lar in his habits as a old married man. Ay, and he's as good, too. 'T least, he's as good to me. So they both be." "Isn't he to his mother?"