MYSELF:  This land wanted draining, didn’t it?

THE OTHER MAN:  Ah!

MYSELF:  It seems to be pretty well drained now.

THE OTHER MAN:  Ugh!

MYSELF:  I mean it seems dry enough.

THE OTHER MAN:  It was drownded only last winter.

MYSELF:  It looks to be good land.

THE OTHER MAN:  It’s lousy land; it’s worth nowt.

MYSELF:  Still, there are dark bits—­black, you may say—­and thereabouts it will be good.

THE OTHER MAN:  That’s where you’re wrong; the lighter it is the better it is ... ah! that’s where many of ’em go wrong. (Short silence.)

MYSELF:  (cheerfully):  A sort of loam?

THE OTHER MAN (calvinistically):  Ugh!—­sand!... (shaking his head). 
It blaws away with a blast of wind. (A longer silence.)

MYSELF (as though full of interest):  Then you set your drills to sow deep about here?

THE OTHER MAN (with a gesture of fatigue):  Shoal. (Here he sighed deeply.)

After this we ceased to speak to each other for several miles.  Then: 

MYSELF:  Who owns the land about here?

THE OTHER MAN:  Some owns parts and some others.

MYSELF (angrily pointing to an enormous field with a little new house in the middle):  Who owns that?

THE OTHER MAN (startled by my tone):  A Frenchman.  He grows onions.

Now if you know little of England and of the temper of the English (I mean of 0.999 of the English people and not of the 0.001 with which you associate), if, I say, you know little or nothing of your fellow-countrymen, you may imagine that all this conversation was wasted.  “It was not to the point,” you say.  “You got no nearer the Griffin.”  You are wrong.  Such conversation is like the kneading of dough or the mixing of mortar; it mollifies and makes ready; it is three-quarters of the work; for if you will let your fellow-citizen curse you and grunt at you, and if you will but talk to him on matters which he knows far better than you, then you have him ready at the end.

So had I this man, for I asked him point-blank at the end of all this:  “What about the Griffin?” He looked at me for a moment almost with intelligence, and told me that he would hand me over in the next village to a man who was going through March.  So he did, and the horse of this second man was even faster than that of the baker.  The horses of the Fens are like no horses in the world for speed.

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