But the strongest influence of all was the love of the old premises where he had run about when he was a boy, just as Tom had done after him. The Tullivers had lived on this spot for generations, and he had sat listening on a low stool on winter evenings while his father talked of the old half-timbered mill that had been there before the last great floods which damaged it so that his grandfather pulled it down and built the new one. It was when he got able to walk about and look at all the old objects that he felt the strain of his clinging affection for the old home as part of his life, part of himself. He couldn’t bear to think of himself living on any other spot than this, where he knew the sound of every gate door, and felt that the shape and colour of every roof and weather-stain and broken hillock was good, because his growing senses had been fed on them. Our instructed vagrancy, which has hardly time to linger by the hedgerows, but runs away early to the tropics, and is at home with palms and banyans,—which is nourished on books of travel and stretches the theatre of its imagination to the Zambesi,—can hardly get a dim notion of what an old-fashioned man like Tulliver felt for this spot, where all his memories centred, and where life seemed like a familiar smooth-handled tool that the fingers clutch with loving ease. And just now he was living in that freshened memory of the far-off time which comes to us in the passive hours of recovery from sickness. “Ay, Luke,” he said one afternoon, as he stood looking over the orchard gate, “I remember the day they planted those apple-trees. My father was a huge man for planting,—it was like a merry-making to him to get a cart full o’ young trees; and I used to stand i’ the cold with him, and follow him about like a dog.” Then he turned round, and leaning against the gate-post, looked at the opposite buildings. “The old mill ’ud miss me, I think, Luke. There’s a story as when the mill changes hands, the river’s angry; I’ve heard my father say it many a time. There’s no telling whether there mayn’t be summat _in_ the story, for this is a puzzling world, and Old Harry’s got a finger in it—it’s been too many for me, I know.” “Ay, sir,” said Luke, with soothing sympathy, “what wi’ the rust on the wheat, an’ the firin’ o’ the ricks an’ that, as I’ve seen i’ my time,—things often looks comical; there’s the bacon fat wi’ our last pig run away like butter,—it leaves nought but a scratchin’.”