Although I promised to see what could be done to carry out so thoughtful a suggestion, and meant to keep my promise, as a matter of fact no steps towards its performance were ever taken; and the thing is mentioned here only as a piece of evidence as to the conditions in which Bettesworth passed the winter. In the background of his mind, there stood always the circumstances which had inspired apprehension in the policeman. I never noted down his dread, because it was too constant a thing; and for a like reason, he seldom spoke of it; but there it always was, immovable. The policeman's talk merely shows that the reasons for it were gathering in force. Save for one or two other equally vague memories, that winter is lost, so far as Bettesworth is concerned. We had some cold though not really severe weather--nothing so terrible as an odd calculation of his would have made it out to be. "For," said he, "we _be_ gettin' it! The Vicar's gardener says there was six degrees o' frost this mornin'.... And five yesterday; an' seven the mornin' before. That makes eighteen degrees!" So he added up the thermometer readings; and, associated with his words, there comes back to me a winter afternoon in which the air had grown tense and still. Under an apple-tree, where the ground, covered with thin snow, was too hard frozen for a tool to penetrate, the emptyings of an ash-bin from the kitchen lay in a little heap; and a dozen or so of starlings were quarrelling over this refuse, flying up to spar at one another, and uttering sharp querulous cries. A white fog hung in the trees. It was real winter, and I laughed to myself, to think what a record Bettesworth might make of it by the following morning. Seeing that every winter now he was troubled with a cough, I may as well give here some undated sentences I have preserved, in which he described how he caught cold on one occasion. "If I'd ha' put on my wrop as soon 's I left off work," he said, "I should ha' bin aw-right. 'Stead o' that, I went scrawneckin' off 'ome jest's I was, an' that's how I copt it." The word scrawnecking, whatever he meant by it, conjures up a picture of him boring blindly ahead with skinny throat uncovered. He took little care of himself; and considering how ill-fed he went now that his wife was so helpless, it was small wonder that he suffered from colds. They did not improve his appetite. They spoilt many a night's rest for him, too. At such times, the account he used to give of his coughing was imitative. "Cough cough cough, all night long." A strong accent on the first and fourth syllables, and a "dying fall" for the others, gives the cadence.