“You’ll not see us again in the old place. We shall be gone in a fortnight. The things are most of them gone already. George has got Bob and Flower. I have sold three of the cows, Stafford, and Julia and Hannah. The place looks very empty. I don’t like going past the cowsheds, and we miss hearing the horses stamp at night. But I shall not be sorry when we have really gone. I begin to feel as if we’d stagnated here. I begin to feel as if I was settling and getting narrow and dull. It will be a new lease of life to get away. “But I’m wondering how we shall be over there. Mrs. Saxton feels very nervous about going. But at the worst we can but come back. I feel as if I must go somewhere, it’s stagnation and starvation for us here. I wish George would come with me. I never thought he would have taken to public-house keeping, but he seems to like it all right. He was down with Meg on Sunday. Mrs. Saxton says he’s getting a public-house tone. He is certainly much livelier, more full of talk than he was. Meg and he seem very comfortable, I’m glad to say. He’s got a good milk-round, and I’ve no doubt but what he’ll do well. He is very cautious at the bottom; he’ll never lose much if he never makes much. “Sam and David are very great friends. I’m glad I’ve got the boy. We often talk of you. It would be very lonely if it wasn’t for the excitement of selling things and so on. Mrs. Saxton hopes you will stick by George. She worries a bit about him, thinking he may go wrong. I don’t think he will ever go far. But I should be glad to know you were keeping friends. Mrs. Saxton says she will write to you about it——.” George was a very poor correspondent. I soon ceased to expect a letter from him. I received one directly after the father’s. “My Dear Cyril, “Forgive me for not having written you before, but you see, I cannot sit down and write to you any time. If I cannot do it just when I am in the mood, I cannot do it at all. And it so often happens that the mood comes upon me when I am in the fields at work, when it is impossible to write. Last night I sat by myself in the kitchen on purpose to write to you, and then I could not. All day, at Greymede, when I was drilling in the fallow at the back of the church, I had been thinking of you, and I could have written there if I had had materials, but I had not, and at night I could not. “I am sorry to say that in my last letter I did not thank you for the books. I have not read them both, but I have nearly finished Evelyn Innes. I get a bit tired of it towards the end. I do not do much reading now. There seems to be hardly any chance for me, either somebody is crying for me in the smoke room, or there is some business, or else Meg won’t let me. She doesn’t like me to read at night, she says I ought to talk to her, so I have to.