Accordingly, anticipating hard times, I set Bettesworth to work in the sheltered spot where digging was still possible, and left him. The day proved sunny on the whole, with a soft winter sunshine, dimmed now and then by grey fog close down to the earth, and now and then by large drifts of foggy cloud passing over from the north. By mid-day the roads were sticky, where the sunshine had thawed the surface, but in shady places the ground was still hard. Here and there was ice, and odd corners remained white with the sprinkling of snow which had fallen two nights previously. Towards sunset I went to see what Bettesworth had done. He had done very little, and, moreover, he had disappeared. The air glowed with the yellow sunset; the soft dim blue of the upper sky was changing to hazy grey in the south-east; in the west, veiling the sunset, lay a bank of clouds, crimson shaded to lilac. I turned to enjoy this as I climbed the garden to find Bettesworth, where he was busy at his yesterday's task. "Well, Bettesworth, how are you getting on?" "Oh, _cold_, sir." Overhead, one or two wisps of smoky-looking cloud were floating southwards. In the sunlight they showed amber against the soft blue, but from their movement and their indistinct and changing form it was plain that they belonged to the system of those larger clouds which had all day been crossing ominously out of the north. I glanced up at them, and remarked that I feared the snow was not far off now. Bettesworth straightened up from his work. "Ah, that's what everybody bin sayin'." "Well, it looks uncommonly like coming." "Ah, it do. Didn't it look black there, along about nine or ten o'clock this mornin'? I thought then we was goin' to have some snow, an' no mistake." He chuckled grimly and continued, "I dunno how we shall git on if it comes to that. But there, we've had it before an' got through somehow, and I dessay we shall git through again." "It's to be hoped so. Anyhow, there seems to be no way of altering it." "No, sir; there don't. I 'xpect we shall have to put up with it. Bear it an' grumble--that's what we shall have to do. We've had to do that before now." It was a blessing, I laughed, that we had the right to grumble; but we hardly learnt to like the winter the better for being used to it. "No; that don't make it none the sweeter, do it? Still, we can't help that. As my old neighbour, Jack Tower, used to say, 'Puverty en't no _crime_, but 'tis a great ill-convenience.'" The touch of epigram in Tower's saying seemed to please Bettesworth, and his speech flowed out with a smooth undulating balance as he repeated slowly, tasting the syllables: "No, cert'nly, puverty en't no crime; but it is a very ill-convenient thing, an' no mistake."