“I suppose this is all nonsense, but I wish it wasn’t. Anyway, it’s what I mean to do myself; and I’m awfully much obliged to you, Dad, for giving me this chance. You’ve hit the right nail on the head this time. Farming was what I was meant for; I feel it. I would have hated being a barrister, setting people by the ears and making my living out of other people’s troubles. Being a farmer you feel that in doing good to yourself you are doing good all round. Miss Janie agrees with all I say. I think she is one of the most sensible girls I have ever come across, and Robin likes her awfully. So is the old man: he’s a brick. I think he has taken a liking to me, and I know I have to him. He’s the dearest old fellow imaginable. The very turnips he seems to think of as though they were so many rows of little children. And he makes you see the inside of things. Take fields now, for instance. I used to think a field was just a field. You scraped it about and planted it with seeds, and everything else depended on the weather. Why, Dad, it’s alive! There are good fields that want to get on—that are grateful for everything you do for them, and take a pride in themselves. And there are brutes of fields that you feel you want to kick. You can waste a hundred pounds’ worth of manure on them, and it only makes them more stupid than they were before. One of our fields—a wizened-looking eleven-acre strip bordering the Fyfield road—he has christened Mrs. Gummidge: it seems to feel everything more than any other field. From whatever point of the compass the wind blows that field gets the most harm from it. You would think to look at it after a storm that there hadn’t been any rain in any other field—that that particular field must have got it all; while two days’ sunshine has the effect upon it that a six weeks’ drought would on any other field. His theory (he must have a theory to account for everything; it comforts him. He has just hit upon a theory that explains why twins are born with twice as much original sin as other children, and doesn’t seem to mind now what they do) is that each odd corner of the earth has gained a character of its own from the spirits of the countless dead men buried in its bosom. ‘Robbers and thieves,’ he will say, kicking the sod of some field all stones and thistles; ‘silly fighting men who thought God built the world merely to give them the fun of knocking it about. Look at them, the fools! stones and thistles—thistles and stones: that is their notion of a field.’ Or, leaning over the gate of some field of rich-smelling soil, he will stretch out his arms as though to caress it: ‘Brave lads!’ he will say; ‘kindly honest fellows who loved the poor peasant folk.’ I fancy he has not got much sense of humour; or if he has, it is a humour he leaves you to find out for yourself. One does not feel one wants to laugh, listening even to his most whimsical ideas; and anyhow it is a fact that