Memoirs of a Surrey Labourer

ithstanding this bad habit, he and Bettesworth had been on excellent terms of friendship. It was to Noah that Bettesworth had turned, for

r else I be scholard enough"), he invited Noah and Noah's wife

s ever they could read up to half-past five." The evening was spent in raising the envy of ot

intense admiration for Nansen, whose bed of sto

me," he exclaimed, "but that! Gawd! wh

gain to help enjoy a seedsman's catalogue

er a higher rent succeeded in getting possession of it. Bettesworth was obliged to quit. He took a cottage in a little row at three-and-sixpence a week, where he was comfortable enough for about a couple of years. At the

arm secluded hollows, down which footpaths wind steeply, or narrow bumpy lanes, to some plank bridge or other thrown across the stream. In these hollows the cottages cluster thickest; there they form little hamlets whose inhabitants sometimes hardly know the other villagers. Such, indeed, is my own case: hundreds of my fellow-parishioners half a mile away are practically strangers to me. Hundreds, for it is a large parish. The bluffs which separate the hollows are not unpeopled; they have their cottages and gardens dotted over them without order at the caprice of former peasant owners. All sorts of footpaths and tracks connect these habitations, but there are few roads, and those are deep in sand. For the labouring people do not i

the town, who had never known, or else had lost, the older peasant traditions which Bettesworth could still cherish-in memory, at least-here in the more ancient part of the village. Of course, that was not how he explained his distaste; he

se, she was subject to epileptic fits. There were days when he worried about her all the time while he was at work, and went home uneasily, dreading to find her fallen down in a fit. It was nece

own to "the Lake," and so over into the meadow opposite; but the last hundred yards of it, from Mrs. Skinner's cottage downwards, have long been washed out into a mere foot-track, deeply sunk between its banks, swooping down precipitously to the stream-level, and scarce two feet wide. So you emerge from the sand cliffs, a

where in the parish. But it had suffered from utter neglect under the previous tenant, a thriftless Irishman, while, after the Irishman left, it stood empty for a time, and looked like falling quite derelict. Then, howev

when telling me his intention. There was some shame, but more of dogged defiance. "You think what you like," s

He done up the roof there t'other week, and he ought to know." Later, the old man repeated Skinner's

se improved the cottage. The place could not be worse used, and

mbling up and down the devious pathways and tracks that led to the cottage, but, unfortunately, the stream this week was in flood. A cart might, indeed, have struggled along it, and one was, in fact, be

able for getting out from the first cottage into one lane, and then round and about, up and down, to the head of the gully by Mrs. Skinner's. Far

enough for him to manage. The main of them were shifted on the Thursday, and I should not like to say how many times that day the old

Freddy, you'd kill half the

ising to lend a hand "in five minutes," he delayed coming until he had found time to get drunk and then arrived with the proposal that Bettesw

l by myself-and he must ha' weighed a hundred and a quarter, with what there was in 'n, ye know-and wheeled 'n down. And then to see this little feller. 'You be in my way,' I says. 'You b

"whacked all the beddin' he could on to the barrer, an

t beside it, through the flooded meadow. The wood was tipped out on to the raised bank across the stream, jus

tead, with only the ol' gal to help me. An' if you told her one thing, it only seemed to make her forget to do something else. Talk about tired! I never had nothin' all that time-not even half a pint o' beer. Ye see, there wa'n't nobody I could send, an' I couldn't spare time to go myself, 'relse I should ha' liked

hes or other household refuse. But now a spirit of order had appeared on the scene. The cabbage-plot became comely; in due season old-fashioned cottage flowers-pinks and nasturtiums-appeared in two tiny borders under the windows on either side of the door, and the mean doorway itself was beautified by a rough but sufficient arbour of larch-posts before it, up which "canary-creeper" found its way. Accordingly, I heard from time to time, but neglected to set down, how this and that wayfarer had praised the old man's improvements. Did not the

der they withies just against my garden," he said;

for the lake, t

some places there en't no lake, and half the wate