A Farmer’s Life 
as a place to avoid, it had been so corrupted by 
Aldershot. ‘Two railway companies had eéstab- 
lished pettifogging stations there, and the neigh- 
bourhood felt mean as well as ugly. But had it 
always been so? I had, and I have, nothing at 
all on which to form an opinion of its condition 
in the eighteenth century; only, without the 
camp, and without the railways, why should not 
Ash have had its share of rustic comeliness? I 
tried to imagine that crabbed old great-grand- 
mother of mine as a young girl courting there. 
Her family anyhow thought well enough of 
themselves to keep a record of their births, 
marriages and deaths—probably in a family 
Bible; and though I knew nothing of their 
status, I knew perhaps something of the family 
character; while here, helpfully, was Richard 
Young in the flesh—justifying in himself all my 
best dreams of the family, and offering, in his 
own occupation, a hint of what theirs may have 
been a century ago, before the neighbourhood 
was spoilt. Ash became quite a decent place to 
think of then. 
With this came further light, as I fancy, on 
John Smith’s father and the stock he came from. 
Though he had been brought up as a potter, his 
family, on the father’s side—provincials in the 
best sense—had been of yeoman breed: pious, 
industrious nobodies. They belonged to that 
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