The obvious goal of an out-of-work in the midlands at that time was Coventry, an ancient city then rising on the third of its great industrial booms, the manufacture of motor-cars. There was always work, and well-paid work, to be had in Coventry. The journey was short, and Abner had no money to waste on railway fares. Even so, the idea of merely moving from one side of the black-country to another did not seem to represent the kind of radical change that he had intended. He wanted to make a clean start in a new country. It suddenly struck him that, after all, there was no real reason why a man should spend the whole of his life in the dust of coal and metal or the smell of fire. This joy of sunlight and fresh air seemed too good to lose. He knew nothing of the conditions of labour in the country beyond the fact that many black-country families migrated every autumn into the fields of Worcestershire for the gathering of hops. He remembered how he had seen these sun-browned companies returning, men, women, and children together, carrying their household goods in old perambulators, looking happier and more healthy than the majority of Halesby people. He had no very definite idea when the ‘hopping’ season began; but whether he were too late for it or too early he knew, at any rate, that he had a store of strength and health to sell. He wasn’t afraid of work. Why shouldn’t he work in the open air? For the summer at least . . . after that he might go down with the money he had earned into the Welsh valleys and take to the pit again. He knew that between him and Wales lay a vast green country in which a man might live as well as anywhere else. Even now the sun was drinking up the mists that concealed it, revealing sombre woodlands heavy in leaf, yellow cornfields, the smoke of hidden towns or villages, and, here and there, a shining bend of river. From that high post, indeed, he gazed upon the pastoral heart of England, the most placid and homely of all her shires; but the national schools had taught him nothing of these things, and, as the mists ascended, showing the cliffs of Cotswold long and level, Bredon an island dome, May Hill and Malvern, Abberley, Clee, and all the nearer hills of Wales, he only knew that it was green and big and that it promised freedom.