The Country Flavour 
particularly sensitive to cold weather in his 
childhood. He used to sit by the open hearth, 
on a cricket Stool, listening when he was small to 
his father’s old tales, for asthma often prevented 
his playing with the other children. At nine 
years old he was so sickly, he told me, that he 
“had to be Jed about.” It was not thought he 
could live to grow up. Long afterwards he had 
curious evidence that folk took this view of him. 
For, being a full-grown man, he went one day 
to the workhouse, to look up an old chap he 
heard was an inmate there but had been a labourer, 
years before, on the farm at Farnborough. The 
old man stood up, and “‘ bowed ” to John Smith 
as to a stranger. But John protested; | * ‘You 
shouldn’t bow tome. You know me, don’t ye?” 
“No, sir, I don’t know who you be.” ** Why, 
don’t you remember Farmer Smith of Farn- 
borough, and his son John?” “ Yes, I remem- 
bers ’em very well. But the farmer’s dead; 
and John’s dead too.” “* Well,” John replied, 
“seein’ that I knows you—it don’t seem to me 
as I can be dead.” 
But however sickly he may have been as a 
child, and however much his memory of the 
seasons may have been affected thereby, he threw 
himself zealously into man’s work as he grew up, 
becoming in temper one with the district and its 
weather and its people. To the people, as to the 
33 . 
