‘Call it twenty-five year, Jabez, an’ you won’t be far out.’

‘Umm!’ Jabez rubbed his wet handbill on his wetter coat-sleeve.  ’She ain’t a hedge.  She’s all manner o’ trees.  We’ll just about have to—­’ He paused, as professional etiquette required.

‘Just about have to side her up an’ see what she’ll bear.  But hadn’t we best—?’ Jesse paused in his turn, both men being artists and equals.

‘Get some kind o’ line to go by.’  Jabez ranged up and down till he found a thinner place, and with clean snicks of the handbill revealed the original face of the fence.  Jesse took over the dripping stuff as it fell forward, and, with a grasp and a kick, made it to lie orderly on the bank till it should be faggoted.

By noon a length of unclean jungle had turned itself into a cattle-proof barrier, tufted here and there with little plumes of the sacred holly which no woodman touches without orders.

‘Now we’ve a witness-board to go by!’ said Jesse at last.

‘She won’t be as easy as this all along,’ Jabez answered.  ’She’ll need plenty stakes and binders when we come to the brook.’

‘Well, ain’t we plenty?’ Jesse pointed to the ragged perspective ahead of them that plunged downhill into the fog.  ‘I lay there’s a cord an’ a half o’ firewood, let alone faggots, ’fore we get anywheres anigh the brook.’

‘The brook’s got up a piece since morning,’ said Jabez.  ’Sounds like’s if she was over Wickenden’s door-stones.’

Jesse listened, too.  There was a growl in the brook’s roar as though she worried something hard.

‘Yes.  She’s over Wickenden’s door-stones,’ he replied.  ’Now she’ll flood acrost Alder Bay an’ that’ll ease her.’

‘She won’t ease Jim Wickenden’s hay none if she do,’ Jabez grunted.  ’I told Jim he’d set that liddle hay-stack o’ his too low down in the medder.  I told him so when he was drawin’ the bottom for it.’

‘I told him so, too,’ said Jesse.  ’I told him ’fore ever you did.  I told him when the County Council tarred the roads up along.’  He pointed uphill, where unseen automobiles and road-engines droned past continually.  ‘A tarred road, she shoots every drop o’ water into a valley same’s a slate roof.  ’Tisn’t as ’twas in the old days, when the waters soaked in and soaked out in the way o’ nature.  It rooshes off they tarred roads all of a lump, and naturally every drop is bound to descend into the valley.  And there’s tar roads both two sides this valley for ten mile.  That’s what I told Jim Wickenden when they tarred the roads last year.  But he’s a valley-man.  He don’t hardly ever journey uphill.’

‘What did he say when you told him that?’ Jabez demanded, with a little change of voice.

‘Why?  What did he say to you when you told him?’ was the answer.

‘What he said to you, I reckon, Jesse.’

‘Then, you don’t need me to say it over again, Jabez.’