"Simon, I pray you answer Iver's letter. Opportunities be like fleas, to be took sharp, or away they goes, they be terrible long-legged. Opportunities only come now and then, and if not caught are lost past recall. 'Twas so wi' Temperance Noakes, who might a' had the chimbley-sweep if she'd a kissed him when he axed. But she said, Wipe and wash your face fust--and she's an old maid now, and goin' sixty. Consider, Simon. Iver be your son, your only child. It's Providence makes us wot we is; that's why you're a man and not a woman. Iver hadn't a gift to be a farmer, but he had to paintin'. It can't be other--it's Providence orders all, or you might be a mother and nursin' a baby, and I smokin' and goin' after the plough in leggin's." "That's all gammon," growled the landlord. "We be gettin' old," pursued Mrs. Verstage. "In the end you'll have to give up work, and who but Iver is to come after you here?" "Him--Iver!" exclaimed Simon. "Your own self says 'e ain't fit to be a farmer." "Then he may let the farm and stick to the inn." "He ain't got the makin' of a publican in him," retorted the man; "he's just about fit for nothin' at all." "Indeed, but he is, Simon," pleaded the woman, "only not in the way you fancies. What good be you now in a public-house? You do nothing there, it is I who have all the managin'." "I attend to the farm. Iver can do neither. All the money you and I ha' scraped together he'll chuck away wi' both hands. He'll let the fences down I ha' set up; he'll let weeds overrun the fields I ha' cleared. It shall not be. It never shall be." "He may marry a thrifty wife, as you have done." "And live by her labor!" he exclaimed, drawing his pipe from his mouth and in knocking out the ash in his anger breaking the stem. "That a child o' mine should come to that!" "Iver is your own flesh and blood," persisted the woman, in great excitement. "How can you be so hard on him? It's just like that old fowl as pecked her eggs, and we had to wring her neck. It's like rabbits as eat their own young. Nonsense! You must be reconciled together. What you have you cannot leave to a stranger." "I can do what I will with my own," retorted Simon. "Look here, Susanna, haven't you had that girl, Matabel, with you in place of a child all these years? Don't she work like a slave? Don't she thoroughly understand the business? Has she ever left the hogs unmeated, or the cow unmilked? If it pleases you to go to market, to be away for a week, a fortni't you know that when you come home again everything will be just as you left it, the house conducted respectable, and every drop o' ale and ounce o' 'backy accounted for." "I don't deny that Matabel's a good girl. But what has that to do with the matter?"