in the North,” that had become as much a regular feature as the weather reports or the society gossip.  The consequent uneasiness made itself felt even in Cornwall, and perhaps the Anti-Slavery meetings held in Penzance were not entirely disinterested.  Also Botallack mine was then in full work and swallowing young men, though for poor enough wage.  One way and another, managing the farm was none too easy, and so John-James had found.  He looked with as much interest as his stolid mind could compass to the return of Ishmael, with the power of the purse-strings and the expenses of his own education at an end, to work something of a miracle at Cloom.  But he had not imagined the miracle to take the form of Jersey cows, and he began to wonder dolefully what newfangled notions about machinery and manure might not also be hatching in the young owner’s brain.  They mounted in silence the steepest slope of the rolling land and came to a stone hedge on which John-James leant, Ishmael beside him.

They stood in silence, John-James because he hardly ever spoke unless spoken to, and Ishmael because over his spirit rushed a flood of memory that for an aching moment overwhelmed him.  This was the field where the Neck had been cried, when, as a little boy, he had first caught at the flying skirts of happiness, first realised the sharpness of the actual instant—­and thought it surely could never, so vivid and insistent was it, cease to be....  Now, as then, his eyes sought the line of twisted hedge, and he saw it, looking so much the same, yet set with leaf and blossom so many seasons away from that August evening, even as he was himself from the child who had thought to arrest Time.  Yet, realising that, he again tried to snatch at the present, though with the difference that now he told himself that anyway there was such a long, long time before him to be young in that it wouldn’t ever pass....

“That’s for ploughing now,” announced John-James suddenly.  “For the mang’ls.  ’Tes as good land as any in the place, and a waste to hav’en grass, so it is.  Maybe you’d like to come and have a try at it, if you’m not gwain to be above turnen your own hand to work?”

Ishmael had a moment’s qualm.  What ploughing he had done had been but slight, and he was not free from an uneasy impression that John-James was laying a trap for him into which he would not be sorry to see him fall.  It would be no better to put it off, for he could imagine the comments that would fly, so he nodded his head.

“We’ll set to work this morning on it,” he agreed lightly; “I suppose you’re still using wooden ploughs down here?”

“Wooden ploughs ...?  And what’d ’ee have ploughs made of, I should like to knaw?  Gold, like what Arch’laus has in Australy?”

“Iron.  All modern ploughs are made of iron, and so are rollers.”

“Iron ... iron rollers.  What’s wrong weth a geart granite roller, lad?”

“Well, it’s very cumbersome, isn’t it?  It’s three men’s work to cart it from one place to another, for one thing.  Anyway, I’ve brought down an iron plough and a chain-harrow....”