He had been on the road forty years. For a short time after his discharge he worked on the land and lived in a cottage with his wife and one child. The church bells were beginning to ring, and I asked him if he was going to church. At first he said nothing, but looked down at his striped waistcoat and patched trousers; then, with a quick violent gesture of scorn, he lifted up his head and even threw it back before he spoke. “Besides,” he said, “I remember how it was my little girl died----My little girl, says I, but she would have been a big handsome woman now, forty-eight years old on the first of May that is gone. She was lying in bed with a little bit of a cough, and she was gone as white as a lily, and I went in to her when I came home from reaping. I saw she looked bad and quiet-like--like a fish in a hedge--and something came over me, and I caught hold of both her hands in both of mine and held them tight, and put my head close up to hers and said, ‘Now look here, Polly, you’ve got to get well. Your mother and me can’t stand losing you. And you aren’t meant to die; such a one as you be for a lark.’ And I squeezed her little hands, and all my nature seemed to rise up and try to make her get well. Polly she looked whiter than ever and afraid; I suppose I was a bit rough and dirty and sunburnt, for ’twas a hot harvest and ’twas the end of the second week of it, and I was that fierce I felt I ought to have had my way.... All that night I thought I had done a wrong thing trying to keep her from dying that way, and I tell you I cried in case I had done any harm by it.... That very night she died without our knowing it. She was a bonny maid, that fond of flowers. The night she was taken ill she was coming home with me from the Thirteen Acre, where I’d been hoeing the mangolds, and she had picked a rose for her mother. All of a sudden she looks at it and says, ‘It’s gone, it’s broke, it’s gone, it’s gone, gone, gone,’ and she kept on, ‘It’s broke, it’s gone, it’s gone,’ and when she got home she ran up to her mother, crying, ‘The wild rose is broke, mother; broke, gone, gone,’ she says, just like that,” said the old man, in a high finical voice more like that of a bird than a child....