Memoirs of a Surrey Labourer

ithout "something to feed," he had bought her a few fowls to amuse her. With stakes and wire netting he made a diminutive "run" for them,

but little profit of them, they afforded him much contentment; and the

nking it a sign of bad luck, but his looks seemed to suggest that he was uneasy. As everyone knows, a crowing hen, if it does not portend death, is neither fit for gods nor men; so Bettesworth realized that he must k

e others of the same class, one of which was inhabited for a little while by a family whose honesty w

f many things. The ill-conditioned neighbours (he comforted himself by thinking) would leav

tool-a spud or anything-in the ground, there 'tis. Nobody don't touch it. Up there at (he named a nea

ust be an equally honest place. The Flamborough people, I had been told, never lock t

ted severely, "Weak-minded, I calls it." Then, after a momentary silence, he was off on a new track, with reminiscences of Selsey fishermen whom he used to see when he went harvesting into Sussex; who go about, "any time o' night,

th had any ghost stories, I harked back now to the Flamborough people, egging him on to be co

e at night to git out the waggon-no, the pole-carriage. I set up on the front on the shafts, with a truss o' hay behind me; and all of a sudden she" (the mare, I suppose he meant) "snarked an' begun to turn round in the road. The chap 'long with me-no, he wa'n't 'long with me, 'cause he'd gone on to open the gate,

of stumbling over a drunken man, who

m like that. I went all asprawl; barked me hands too. But w

worm picked up, and worn in a cap for a little way, and then missed; of a glimmer seen in the ditch, which might be the g

. It opened another vista of reminiscence, down which he could

rley was s'posed to go out at such a job, if need be. So he sends round the message to 'em-Bromley, an' Dick Harris, an' Knight, an' several more, to meet 'n at a certain place, where he'd heard these chaps say they was goin' to work. And so they (the poachers) set in there talkin' about what they was goin' to do; and at last, when they co