faggots.  In the garden three or four aged and mossgrown apple-trees stood among the little plots of potatoes, and as many plum-trees in the elder hedge.  One tall pear-tree with scored bark grew near the end of the cottage; it bore a large crop of pears, which were often admired by the people who came along the road, but were really hard and woody.  As a child he played in the ditch and hedge, or crept through into the meadow and searched in the spring for violets to offer to the passers-by; or he swung on the gate in the lane and held it open for the farmers in their gigs, in hope of a halfpenny.

As a lad he went forth with his father to work in the fields, and came home to the cabbage boiled for the evening meal.  It was not a very roomy or commodious home to return to after so many hours in the field, exposed to rain and wind, to snow, or summer sun.  The stones of the floor were uneven, and did not fit at the edges.  There was a beam across the low ceiling, to avoid which, as he grew older, he had to bow his head when crossing the apartment.  A wooden ladder, or steps, not a staircase proper, behind the whitewashed partition, led to the bedroom.  The steps were worm-eaten and worn.  In the sitting-room the narrow panes of the small window were so overgrown with woodbine as to admit but little light.  But in summer the door was wide open, and the light and the soft air came in.  The thick walls and thatch kept it warm and cosy in winter, when they gathered round the fire.  Every day in his manhood he went out to the field; every item, as it were, of life centred in that little cottage.  In time he came to occupy it with his own wife, and his children in their turn crept through the hedge, or swung upon the gate.  They grew up, and one by one went away, till at last he was left alone.

He had not taken much conscious note of the changing aspect of the scene around him.  The violets flowered year after year; still he went to plough.  The May bloomed and scented the hedges; still he went to his work.  The green summer foliage became brown and the acorns fell from the oaks; still he laboured on, and saw the ice and snow, and heard the wind roar in the old familiar trees without much thought of it.  But those old familiar trees, the particular hedges he had worked among so many years, the very turf of the meadows over which he had walked so many times, the view down the road from the garden gate, the distant sign-post and the red-bricked farmhouse—­all these things had become part of his life.  There was no hope nor joy left to him, but he wanted to stay on among them to the end.  He liked to ridge up his little plot of potatoes; he liked to creep up his ladder and mend the thatch of his cottage; he liked to cut himself a cabbage, and to gather the one small basketful of apples.  There was a kind of dull pleasure in cropping the elder hedge, and even in collecting the dead branches scattered under the trees.  To be about the hedges, in the meadows, and along the brooks was necessary to him, and he liked to be at work.