As for Albert and Richard, they did not even work well, and they grumbled and shirked as much as they dared. They had ambitions, but so utterly at variance with Odiam's as to be worse than none. Albert wanted to be a poet and Richard to be a gentleman. What there was in either Reuben or Naomi to make a poet of their eldest son would be hard to say. Perhaps it was the glow of their young love, so golden and romantic during the first year of their marriage. If so, there was something of bitter irony in this survival and transmutation of it. Odiam was no place for poets, and Reuben tried by every means in his power to knock the poetry out of Albert. It was not the actual poetry he objected to so much as the vices which went with it--forgetfulness, unpracticalness, negligence. Albert would sometimes lose quite half an hour's work by falling into a dream, he also played truant on occasions, and would disappear for hours, indeed now and then for a day or more, wandering in the fields and spinneys, tasting the sharp sweetness of the dawn and the earth-flavoured sleep of the night. For though he did not care for Odiam he loved the country round it, and made a wonderland and a dreamland of it. He did not see in Boarzell Robert's tree-capped waste, though neither did he see his father's enemy and heart's delight. He saw instead a kind of enchanted ground, full of mysteries of sun and moon, full of secrets that were sometimes beautiful, sometimes terrifying. It seemed to have a soul and a voice, a low voice, hoarse yet sweet; and its soul was not the soul of a man or of a beast, but the soul of a fetch, some country sprite, that clumped, and yet could skip ... he used to feel it skipping with him in the evening wind when the dusk made the heather misty round his knees ... but he knew that it danced heavy-footed round the farm at night, clumping, clumping, like a clod. Reuben had no sympathy with these fancies when they took his son out of hard-working common sense into idle-handed, wander-footed dreams, or when perhaps he found them scribbled on the back of his corn accounts. He did not spare the rod, but Albert had all the rather futile obstinacy of weak-willed people, and could be neither persuaded nor frightened out of his dreams.