Odiam was a leper. None might leave it without rubbing his boots in lime, no beasts could be driven beyond its hedges. More, the curse afflicted the guiltless--the markets at Rye and Battle were forbidden, the movements of cattle were restricted, and Coalbran once indignantly showed Reuben a certificate which he found he must have ready to produce every time he moved his single cow across the lane from the hedge pasture to the stream fallow. Public opinion was against Backfield, and blamed him surlily for the local inconvenience. "Döan't tell me," said Coalbran in the bar, "as it wurn't his fault. Foot-and-mouth can't just drop from heaven. He must have bought some furriners, and they've carried it wud 'em, surelye." "Serve un right," said Ticehurst. "Still, I'm sorry for him," said Realf of Grandturzel--"he's the only man hereabouts wot's really made a serious business of farming, and it's a shame he should get busted." "He äun't busted yet," said Coalbran. "But you mark my words, he will be," said Ticehurst; "anyways I shud lik him to be, fur he's a high-stomached man, and only deserves to be put down." "He's down enough now, surelye! I saw him only yesterday by the Glotten meadows, and there was a look in his eye as I'll never forget." "And yit he's as proud as the Old Un himself. I met him on Thursday, and I told him how unaccountable sorry we all wur fur him, and he jest spat." "I offered to help him wud his burning," said Realf, "and he said as he'd see me and my lousy farm burnt first." "He's a tedious contradictious old feller--he desarves all he's got. Let's git up a subscription fur him--that ud cut him to the heart, and he wudn't täake it, so it ud cost us naun, nuther." The rest of the bar seemed to think, however, that Reuben might take the money out of spite, so Coalbran's charitable suggestion collapsed for lack of support. Meantime, so fast bound in the iron of his misery that he scarcely felt the prick of tongues, Reuben lived through the final stages of his nightmare--those final stages of shock and upheaval when the fiery torment of the dream dies down into the ashes of waking. He wandered over his land in his lime-caked boots, scarcely talking to those at work on it, directing with mere mechanical activity the labour which now seemed to him nothing but the writhings of a crushed beetle. Everyone felt a little afraid of him, everyone avoided him as much as possible--he was alone. His nostrils were always full of the smart of lime, and the stench of those horrible furnaces belching away on the slopes of the Moor. Would that burning never be done? For days the yellowy white pennons of destruction had flown on Boarzell, and that acrid reek polluted the harvest wind. Boarzell was nothing but a huge funeral pyre, a smoking hell.... "And the smoke of her went up for ever and ever." § 17.