I didn't wait for _my_ lecture: I had to get the pony home. It was runnin' off 'n, when I got 'n down to his stable, with the pace we'd made, an' the beer he'd had. We should ha' got into trouble for it if 't had been now. The old woman come out, an' begun goin' on about it; but the old man says, 'You might be sure they'd travel, for such a job. And he won't be none the worse for it.' We put 'n in the stable, an' give 'n another pint o' beer, and rubbed 'n down an' throwed two or three hop-sacks over 'n; an' next mornin' he was as right as ever." "How long ago?" I asked. "I 'most forgets how long ago 'twas. A smartish many years. His wife--she bin dead this--let's see--three-an'-twenty year; and she lived a good many years after he." She had property--her husband's, no doubt--which her son Will (Bettesworth's wife's brother, remember) inherited, yet only by the skin of his teeth. For if some infant or other had breathed after birth, that infant's relatives would have been the heirs. On this sort of subject people like Bettesworth are always most tedious and obscure. As to the household stuff, it was to be divided; "and when it come to our turn to choose," Bettesworth said, "my old gal and me said Will could have ourn. We'd got old clutter enough layin' about, and Will hadn't got none, ye see, always livin' with his mother. So he had the stuff an' the cot. They" (the rival party) "had two or three tries for it; but 'twas proved that the child never breathed. My wife's sister Jane thought _she_ was goin' to get it. But I says, 'No, Jane; you wears the wrong clothes. That belongs to William.'" Bettesworth ceased. In the ten or fifteen minutes while he had been talking we had got far from the subject of peasant industries; and yet somehow the thought of them was still present to both of us, and when he grew silent I nodded my head contemplatively, murmuring something about "queer old times." "Yes," he returned, "a good many wouldn't be able to tell ye how they _did_ bring up a family o' childern, if you was to ast 'em." And so, with the rain pattering down upon the shed roof, I left the old man to his wood-chopping. _June 11, 1904._--The twentieth century is driving out the old-fashioned people and their savagery from the village, but here and there it lets in savagery of its own. Into that hovel down by the stream, which Bettesworth had vacated, there had come fresh tenants, as I knew; but that was all I knew until one morning Bettesworth told me something, which I lost no time in hurrying down on to paper, while his sentences were hot in my mind, as follows: "Ha' ye heared about our neighbours down 'ere runnin' away?" "No! Where?" "Down here where I used to live. Gone off an' left their little childern to the wide world." "Well, but ... who...?" "Worcester they _calls_ 'n. But I dunno what his name is." "Where did he come from? I don't seem to know him."