I asked him the way to the nearest village, and whether a bed was to be had there. He answered that it was some way off--paused, looked at me, drank from his tankard--and added in a lower voice that he would be glad if I would come and share his place. Such an unusual invitation enforced assent. A quarter of a mile down the next by-way he opened a little oaken gate that slammed after us, and there, in a corner of a small, flat field, was his sleeping place, under an oak. Would I care to join him in fried bacon and broad beans and tea at six the next morning? He lit a wisp of hay and soon had a fire burning, and brought over some hay and sacks for the second bed. The lights of the farmhouse shone on the other side of the little field behind lilac bushes. The farmhouse pump gave out a cry like a guinea fowl for a few minutes. Then the lights went out. I asked the name of the farm and he told me. “I come here almost every summer for the haymaking,” he said, and detecting my surprise that it was not his first year of haymaking, he continued-- “It is my tenth summer, to be exact.” He was a man of hardly over thirty, and I noticed that his hands, though small and fine, were rough and warty and dark. Thoughtlessly I remarked that he must find the winter hard if he travelled like this all the year round. “Yes,” he said, with a sigh, “it is, and that is why I go back in the winter; at least partly why.” “Go back----?” “Yes, to London.” I was still perplexed. He had the air of a town-bred man of the clerkly class, but no accent, and I could not think what he did in London that was compatible with his present life. “Are you a Londoner, then?” “Yes, and no. I was born at the village of ---- in Caermarthenshire. My father was a clerk in a coal merchant’s office of the neighbouring town. But he thought to better himself, worked hard in the evenings and came to London, when I was seven, for a better-paid post. We lived in Wandsworth in a small street newly built. I went to a middle-class school close by until I was sixteen, and then I went into a silk merchant’s office. My father died soon after. He had never been strong, and from the first year’s work in the city, I have heard my mother say, he was a doomed man. He made no friends. While I was young he gave up all his spare time to me and was happy, wheeling me, my mother walking alongside, out into the country on every Sunday that was not soaking wet, and nearly every Saturday afternoon, too.