A Farmer’s Life 
weather, he turned a resolute though friendly 
face, keeping close to their essential character, 
shrewdly judging them all the time, but far oftener 
liking their oddities than blaming their follies. 
He himself knew the difficulties of life far too 
intimately to be in a hurry to find fault. 
Although I had known him all my life, he had 
gone far past the middle of his own before we 
got into anything like real friendship. By then, 
his mother being dead, he had finished out the 
tenancy of the old farm at Farnborough and was 
entered into a larger farm at Frimley, which in 
his hands was chiefly a dairy farm. Rushes grew 
too readily in it: rushes and brake ferns—plainly 
it had not been long or thoroughly reclaimed 
from the marshy moorland. ‘The Blackwater ran, 
or almost stagnated, on its western boundaries ; 
deep ditches intersected it; yet in wet seasons 
the waterlogged pastures were flooded, and across 
the few ploughed fields the standing water in the 
furrows glittered in long parallels of reflection 
from the sky. Only in hot seasons was the land 
tolerably dry; but in the summer plentiful lines 
of feathery trees gave the farm and the whole 
district a most peaceful look. And John Smith’s 
spirit loved the peace of it. Certainly it was no 
farm for a fat profit; but it suited him. It 
provided plenty of opportunities for industrious 
effort with the soil, the water-courses, the timber. 
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