It still interested him to hear of the garden, and he asked how the potatoes were coming up, and listened to my account of the peas and carrots, but said he was "never much of a one" for carrots. At home I had left George Bryant lawn-mowing. Well, Bettesworth too had mown my lawn in hot weather, and smiled happily at the reminiscence. He smiled again when, recalling how I had known him now for fourteen years, I reminded him of the great piece of trenching which had been his first job for me. So presently I came away, out on to the sunny road, thinking, "I shall not see him many more times." From just there I caught a glimpse of Leith Hill, blue with twenty intervening miles of afternoon sunlight: twenty miles of the England Bettesworth has served. Half-way down the hill the old road-mender, straightening up from his work as I passed, asked, "Can ye keep yerself warm, sir?" And I laughed, "Pretty nearly. How about you?" "It _boils_ out," he said. The perspiration stood on his face while he spoke of motor-cars, and the dust they raised; but to me dust and swift-travelling cars and all seemed to tell of summer afternoon. And though the reason is obscure, somehow it seems fit that possibly my last talk with Bettesworth should be associated with the blue distant English country, and the summer dust, and that sunburnt old folk jest which consists in asking, when it is so particularly and exhilaratingly warm as to-day, "Can you keep yourself warm?" _July 21._--The weather was as brilliantly hot this afternoon as a week ago; and Bettesworth's bedroom looked just as before; but the old man was changed. He lay with eyes looking glazed between the half-shut lids, and he was breathing hard. His niece accompanied me upstairs; but he took no notice of our entry until she mentioned my name, upon which he turned a little and put up a feeble hand for me to take. He was in a sort of stupor, though he seemed to rouse a little, and to understand one or two remarks I ventured. But when he spoke it was as if utterly exhausted, and we could not always make out his meaning. In the hope of helping him to realize that I was with him, I told of the garden, and how Bryant was mowing again, though in this hot weather the lawn was "getting pretty brown, _you_ know." "Yes," he said feebly, "and if you don't keep it cut middlin' short, it soon goes wrong." Next I reported on the potatoes--how well they were coming: "the same sort as you planted for me last year." "Ah--the _Victoria_, wa'n't they?" The question was a mere murmur. "No, _Duke of York_. And don't you remember what a crop we had, when you planted 'em?" There came the faintest of smiles, and "None of what I planted failed much, did they?" Indeed, no. The shallots he had planted during his last day's work had just been harvested; the beans which he sowed the same day had but now yielded their last picking. I told him they were over. "You can't expect no other," he said, meaning at this time of