“I’ll tell you about him in a moment; but thinking of the days of my mother’s death puts me in mind of a strange thing that happened at the time that will show you what sort of man your grandfather was. Early on in the family there had been a girl that died to whom my mother was particularly devoted; and a little before the end—she knew that it couldn’t be many weeks—mother told my father that she would like to be buried in a particular corner of the churchyard near to this daughter of theirs. “Father never spoke of it. He rarely spoke of anything. But I suppose he took it in all the same. Anyway, when she was dead, the old sexton came up to see father about the grave, and he told him where she had said she wanted to lie. The next night the sexton came up again. I can see him now—a funny, old-fashioned little man with red whiskers—and said it couldn’t be done, because the soil was so shallow at that particular point. I can see my father now. He hadn’t been drinking; but be flew suddenly into such a black rage that the poor little gravedigger (Satell was his name) ran out frightened for his life. I think I was pretty frightened too, for father went out after him carrying one of the great iron bars that the miners use for drilling. I thought for a moment that the loss of mother had turned his head. It hadn’t. He just went there and then, in the night, to the churchyard, and worked away with his mining tools at the rock that poor old Satell said he couldn’t dig. He bored his holes and he blasted the rock with the black powder they used in those days, and he dug my mother’s grave in the place where she wanted it. You see what a strange man he was! You may say what you like, Eddie—I’ve often thought of it since—but that was a grandfather worth having.” “Yes . . . he was worth having,” Edwin agreed. “But I was speaking of Dr. Marshall,” his father continued. “He was the beginning of my new life. But for the accident of my mother’s illness I don’t suppose I should ever have met him. During the last month he came fairly often: not that he could do much good for her, poor thing, but because she was—it’s a wretched phrase—a superior woman, and because no doubt she liked to talk to him, and he knew it. Practice in Highberrow can’t have been very profitable; though I’m sure that my father paid him every penny that he owed him. He was that kind of man.