A Farmer’s Life 
a sort of pottering industry which kept him still 
close in touch with his happiest interests. Besides 
his daily milk-round in Farnborough he was glad 
to give, and his sons were glad to have, his help 
at the milking every afternoon. He had but to 
cross the road to be back again in the familiar 
farm, and to feel the old life going on all round 
him almost as if he had never left it. The 
principal change was that he had cast off the ulti- 
mate cares no man in business may evade.  Visit- 
ing him, I often accompanied him to the farm, 
and I saw next to no difference. It was a little 
curious, now I think of it. In the cottage I 
heard perhaps of doings long ago; and then, 
Strolling across the road, I saw, in more modern 
life, some illustration or other of the earlier life 
we had been discussing. It was like living in 
two epochs at once. 
For example, that very day of my first visit 
to the cottage, the carter from the farm was gone 
to the parish gravel-pits to dig and bring home 
gravel for laying down in the farm-yard. Just 
as the clay on Cove Common (my uncle had been 
telling of fetching it from there fifty years 
previously), so now this local gravel was to be 
had for the getting. And conceivably, if Farmer 
Smith’s sons in after life should tell of their 
carter going on such an errand three or four times 
a day, the hearer might think, as I had been doing, 
how full of incident that old life must have been, 
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