430 A FARMER'S YEAR 



hid himself in a ditch until that official had departed, with the 

 result that he still continues his free but precarious existence. 



After all, his terror is not to be wondered at when we remember 

 that were we suddenly to be deported to America to end our days, 

 it would scarcely be a greater break to us than his removal to 

 Heckingham, seven miles away, is to such a person. Once there 

 he cannot get out of the place, for he is too feeble to visit his 

 former haunts, and even if he has descendants or relatives, they very 

 rarely come to see him perhaps never until they are summoned 

 to fetch away the body, for few care to ' keep up ' with a relation 

 in the House. In short, he is divorced from the old surroundings, 

 to which he has been accustomed for sixty or seventy years, and 

 caged among strangers in a strange land ; doomed, ^vhen the 

 bread of charity has been eaten to its last bitter crumb, there to 

 die and be thrust away, perhaps beneath one of those nameless 

 mounds in the grave-field, where, staring vacantly through the 

 fence, he can see the Union cows at grass. 



Better, argues such an one as Turk Taylor, is freedom than 

 such a fate as this, although to be free may mean starvation in a 

 fireless house. Perhaps, under similar circumstances, some of us 

 would come to a like conclusion. 



What do these old fellows think about, I wonder, as they hobble 

 to and fro round those measureless precincts of bald brick? The 

 sweet- eyed children that they begot and bred up fifty years ago, per- 

 haps, whose pet names they still remember, dead or lost to them to- 

 day for the most part ; or the bright waving cornfields whence they 

 scared birds when they were lads from whom death and trouble were 

 yet a long way off. I dare say, too, that deeper problems worry 

 them at times in some dim half-apprehended fashion ; at least I 

 thought so when the other day I sat behind two of them in a church 

 near the workhouse. They could not read, and I doubt if they 

 understood much of what was passing, but I observed consideration 

 in their eyes. Of what ? Of the terror and the marvel of existence, 

 perhaps, and of that good God whereof the parson is talking in 

 those long unmeaning words. God ! They know more of the devil 



