Not long afterwards, Noah was called in again to help enjoy a seedsman's catalogue. It was read through from cover to cover. Yet Noah proved to be a treacherous friend, after all. I have no record of the occurrence, but I think it must have been in the summer of 1897 that he began to covet Bettesworth's pleasant cottage, and by offering the owner a higher rent succeeded in getting possession of it. Bettesworth was obliged to quit. He took a cottage in a little row at three-and-sixpence a week, where he was comfortable enough for about a couple of years. At the end of that period, however, certain difficulties over the water-supply became acute--a laundress next door was pumping the well dry--and other discomforts arising, he began in the autumn of 1899 to look out for another home. It is a singular place, this parish. The narrow valley it occupies is that of a small water-course commonly known as "The Lake," which in summer is a dry bed of sand, but in winter becomes a respectable brook of yellow waters which grow quite turbulent at times of flood. In their turbulence through long ages they have cut deep into the northern side of the valley, and now for some two miles that northern side, all warm and sunny, slopes down towards the stream, and there breaks off in precipitous sand-banks which in most places overhang the stream and make it inaccessible. But not in all places. There are various gaps in the sand-banks, where the rains and storms of centuries have scooped out the upper slope into tiny gorges and warm secluded hollows, down which footpaths wind steeply, or narrow bumpy lanes, to some plank bridge or other thrown across the stream. In these hollows the cottages cluster thickest; there they form little hamlets whose inhabitants sometimes hardly know the other villagers. Such, indeed, is my own case: hundreds of my fellow-parishioners half a mile away are practically strangers to me. Hundreds, for it is a large parish. The bluffs which separate the hollows are not unpeopled; they have their cottages and gardens dotted over them without order at the caprice of former peasant owners. All sorts of footpaths and tracks connect these habitations, but there are few roads, and those are deep in sand. For the labouring people do not interchange visits and pay calls; they just go to work and come home again, each to his own place. At home, they look out upon their own particular hollow, and upon little besides; or, living high up on a bluff, they get outlook upon the other side of the main valley, which is lower, tamer, smoother than this. It begins--that other side--in narrow meadow or plough land at the bottom, and so rises gently to a ridge fringed with cottages. In addition to these dwellings, there are a few hovels down by the stream itself, with their backs stuck into the sand-cliffs, and with gardens between cliff and stream so narrow that a man might almost jump across them. A second jump would take him over the stream