He accepted his position with a fairly good grace--to complain would have made things worse for Tilly and the children. He was inclined privately to scoff at some of Reuben's ideas on farming, but even as he did so he realised the irony of it. He might have done otherwise, yes, but he was kicked out of his farm, the servant of the man whose methods he thought ridiculous. Reuben on his side thought Realf a fool. He despised him for failing to lift Grandturzel out of adversity, as he had lifted Odiam. He would not have kept him on as bailiff if he had thought there would have otherwise been any chance of his accepting Odiam's terms. He disliked seeing him about the place, and did not find--as the neighbourhood pictured he must--any satisfaction in watching his once triumphant rival humbly performing the duties of a servant on the farm that used to be his own. Reuben's hatreds were not personal, they were merely a question of roods and acres, and when that side of them was appeased, nothing remained. They were, like almost everything else of his, a question of agriculture, and having now settled Realf agriculturally he had no grudge against him personally. About this time old Beatup died. He was Odiam's first hand, and had seen the farm rise from sixty acres and a patch on Boarzell to two hundred acres and nearly the whole Moor. Reuben was sorry to lose him, for he was an old-fashioned servant--which meant that he gave much in the way of work and asked little in the way of wages or rest. The young men impudently demanded twenty shillings a week, wanted afternoons in the town, and complained if he worked them overtime--there had never been such a thing as overtime till board schools were started. However, of late Beatup had been of very little use. He was some years younger than Reuben, but he looked quite ten years older, and his figure was almost exactly like an S. The earth had used him hardly, steaming his bones into strange shapes and swellings, parching his skin to something dark and crackled like burnt paper, filling him with stiffness and pains. Reuben had straightened his shoulders, which had drooped a little after David's death, and once more carried his old age proudly, as the crown of a hale and strenuous life. He looked forward to William coming back and settling down at Odiam. It would be good to have companionship again. The end of the war was in sight--only a guerilla campaign was being waged among the kopjes, Kruger had fled from Pretoria, and everyone talked of Peace.