A Farmer’s Life 
it enabled us to take him, along by-paths (for 
motor-cars were a nuisance on the roads), into 
parts as unlike his own level fields as need be; 
and he looked almost with wonder at the valley 
and the gullies and the shaggy heaths of the 
Bourne. Had he but been forty years old 
instead of over eighty! ‘The interest of thrusting 
one’s faculties into a new neighbourhood quick- 
ened in him even as it was. 
And, thanks perhaps to this recovery of spirits, 
his memories of older times grew richer. ‘This 
was our evening programme—from a short 
outing we would get back home to a fairly early 
supper, and then, after lighting a lamp, would 
sit chatting until bed-time by the table, from 
which it was difficult for him to move. All his 
former life, and especially the earlier years, 
seemed to come back to him with revived interest, 
if not with delight. Many of the details worked 
into the narrative of his father were obtained in 
those evenings; and then too it was that I got 
some particulars of his own childhood, as now 
set down in the earlier chapters of this book. 
Farnborough village, Welsh cattle, the ‘ Tumble- 
down Dick,” Dog-traction, Jack the Matchman, 
Machinery Riots, and so on, drifted in vivid 
pictures across his memory. Most of it was not 
new to me, or did but add a point or two to 
what was already known. Yet I was very 
14.4 
