Reuben could not understand how his sons could care so little about that which was all things to him. He had brought them up to his ambitions--they were not like Naomi, thrust into them in later, less-impressionable years. He had not been weak with them, and not been cruel--yet only Pete was at all satisfactory. However, he was not the man to sit down and despair before his obstacles. He made the best of things as they were--ground work out of his lads, since he could not grind enthusiasm, and trusted to the future to stir up a greater hope. He somehow could not believe that his boys could go through all their lives not caring for Odiam. Albert continued weakly and picturesquely to offend. He was now nearly twenty-one, and had begun to run after girls in a stupid way. Reuben, remembering how sternly he had deprived himself of pleasures of this kind, ruthlessly spoiled his son's philanderings ... but the crime he could not forgive, which set the keystone on his and the boy's antagonism, was the publication of some verses by Albert in the _Rye Advertiser_. To begin with, it was a Liberal paper, and though the verses were of a strictly non-political kind, dealing chiefly with Amelia's eyes, it seemed to Reuben shockingly unprincipled to defile oneself in any way with Radical print. But even without that the thing was criminal and offensive. "I wöan't have no hemmed poetry in my family!" stormed Reuben, for Albert had as usual stage-managed a "scene." "You've got your work to do, and you'll justabout do it." "But fäather, it didn't täake up any of my time, writing that poem. I wrote it at my breakfast one mornun two months ago----" "Yes, that's it--instead of spending twenty minnut at your breakfast, you spend forty. You idle away my time wud your hemmed tricks, and I wöan't have it, I tell you, I wöan't have it. Lord! when I wur your age, I wur running the whole of this farm alone--every ströak of work, I did it. I didn't go wasting time over my meals, and writing rubbidge fur low-down Gladstone päapers. Now döan't you go sassing me back, you young good-fur-nothing, or I'll flay you, surelye!" Albert could not help a grudging admiration of his father. Reuben could be angry and fling threats, and yet keep at the same time a certain splendour, which no violence or vulgarity could dim. The boy, in spite of his verses, which were execrable enough, had a poet's eye for the splendid, and he could not be blind to the qualities of his father's tyranny, even though that tyranny crushed him at times. Reuben was now forty-three; a trifle heavier in build, perhaps, but otherwise as fine and straight a man as he had been at twenty. His clear brown skin, keen eyes, thick coal-black hair, his height, his strength, his dauntless spirit, could not fail to impress one in whom the sense of life and beauty was developing. Albert even once began a poem to his father: "You march across the mangold field, And all our limbs do shake...."