A Farmer’s Life 
farm-work. Its bottom timbers were framed 
in the style which at the time of my visit lingered 
in Sussex only. Narrow-waisted it was, and the 
front half of it rose boat-like over the fore-carriage. 
That shape, however, being inconvenient for 
stacking pottery ware, had been correéted in 
the other waggon, only the body of which, as my 
uncle now bethought him, had been renewed fifty 
years ago, over older wheels and under-works. 
In this, the bottom timbers were almost flat and 
parallel. Both waggons had old-fashioned iron- 
work—square stays and ribbed strouter-sockets. 
I viewed them with some emotion. Their 
timbers were broken; they were too dilapidated 
for all but hay-carting and harvesting about the 
fields; they would never travel the hard roads 
again. Before my time a man of my own name 
had built them. I must, as a little boy, have 
ridden in them myself; I had lately heard one 
of them creaking over the stubble under a load 
of sheaves—there still was the loose spoke I had 
heard creak. But they could not do much more; 
and, as I looked, fancies of other days grew vivid 
in me, drifting in with the scent of burning weeds 
and the pictures of the autumn fields and the 
women working. 
But the waggons must have meant much more 
to the farmer beside me. He began to tell 
of the toll-gates on the turnpikes so many years 
72 
