He hesitated, yet scarcely two seconds, and then replied: "Not much. I helped mow Holt Park once. My father-in-law--_Foreman_, we used to call 'n--was at it--what lived where Mrs. Warner is, and I lived where Porter do. And the Foreman sent for me to go and help. I didn't want to go--'tis hard work; anybody might have mowin' for me; but at last I agreed to go. But law! the second mornin' I was like that I didn't hardly know how to crawl down there" the three miles. "It got better after an hour or two.... But if a feller goes mowin' for eight or nine weeks on end, it do give 'n a doin'." Thus for a little while Bettesworth chatted, in the vein that had first attracted me to him. Shall I ever hear him again, I wonder? We tried other subjects: the washed-out state of our lane and the best way to remedy it, the garden, the celery, the position of this or that crop. It entertained him for a few minutes; then he failed to seize some quite simple idea, and knew that he had failed, and said despondently, "I can't keep things in my mind like I used to." _July 2 (Sunday)._--Perhaps Bettesworth would have been more like himself on Friday, if I had called at the usual afternoon hour, instead of in the morning. As it was, he seemed fretful and impatient, and his face was flushed. I did not perceive that he was noticeably weaker, but rather that he was irritable. He had pain in his chest and side; and he said that at night, when he lies with his hands clasped over his waist, his chest is full of "such funny noises, enough to frighten ye to hear 'em." His temper was embittered and angry, especially angry, when some reference was made to his being in the infirmary in the spring. For he affirmed, "If I hadn't ha' went there, I should ha' bin a man, up and at work _now_. I told the doctor there, 'If I was to bide here, you'd _starve_ me to death.'" Embittered he was against his acquaintances, so that he almost wept. "It hurts me so, to think how good I bin to 'em; and now when I be bad myself there en't none of 'em comes near me." He instanced his sister and her two sons at Middlesham; and his brother-in-law too: "Look what I done for him!" If only he could get about! Get so that he could sit and feel the air! But his bedroom is upstairs, and he is too weak to leave it. The previous night, trying to get out of bed, he "almost broke his neck," falling backwards with his head against the bedstead. "I thought I'd split 'n open," he said, "but I never called nobody. Jack said, 'Why hadn't ye called me?'" ... The old man's talk was too incoherent, too rambling, to be followed well at the time or remembered now.