Half of Dafydd Dafis's men lodged at one or other of the farms and cottages, to the tenants of which they were bound by ties of consanguinity; the others put up at the little alehouse half a mile out on the Porth Neigr road, which served also as a shop for the outlying farms. Dafydd paid their wages, and they had built a hearth near the mortar heap for the cooking of their dinners. John Willie dined daily with them. Never was such importance as that with which he came nigh to bursting. The rocks and the rabbits, the boats and the Trwyn, no longer called him; here was not only a house going up, but his house. In his father's absence he could give orders. He became knowing in limes and mortars, expert in the use of the plumb and level. He strutted about with a square, setting it carelessly against angles, and derided Eesaac Oliver and his slates and long-division sums. The eaves-level was reached; they began to get the roof-timbers up; the sandhills resounded with hammering and sawing; and the upper part of the house began to resemble a toast-rack against the sky. Only one stone remained to be set in position. This was the gable-stone with "E. G., 1882" upon it. John Willie warned Eesaac Oliver that the slates on which he ciphered would soon be required. As matters turned out, he was wrong in this. Already three men, a plumber, his mate, and a carpenter, had been down from Manchester, and fresh supplies of timber--sections of staircase and so on--had come in carts over the sound-deadening sandhills. But how all at once the work came to a sudden stop--how that toast-rack stood against the sky for another year without a slate upon it--and how Edward Garden, away in Manchester, had once more to accept the line of least resistance, while his son loitered disconsolately about the unfinished building until something even more exciting claimed his interest--to tell these things another chapter had better be begun. III THE MINDER The land on which, as Squire Wynne had told Edward Garden, other mortgages were being foreclosed, began a furlong or so behind the unfinished house, reaching to and including one of the farms--Fotty, John Pritchard's. It formed a three-hundred-yards-wide strip of bents and rough grazing, which spread out inland with Fotty in the middle of its base. The mortgagee was Squire Wynne's Liverpool wine-merchant, and he had accepted the mortgage partly because he did not wish to be at cross-purposes with such of Squire Wynne's friends as were good customers of his, and partly because he was not very likely to get anything else in settlement of a longish account. This account had been reckoned off the sum advanced, which, besides, was based on a low valuation; and, not wanting the land himself, he was ready enough to sell to any optimist who did. The land remained in the possession of the wine-merchant for exactly eleven weeks. At the end of that time he had found his optimist in the person of Terry Armfield.