170 THE SOUTH COUNTRY 



"Two beds?" 



"That is what we should h'ke," said my friend 

 and I. 



"What do you want with two beds? " he asked with 

 a tinge of scorn as well as of pity in his frank amusement. 

 "My missus and I have only had one bed these forty 

 years." 



Here he laughed so gaily that he could not have 

 embarrassed the very devil of puritanism, and turning to 

 his man he called forth a deep bass laughter and from 

 his wife a peal that shook her arms so that she raised 

 them to the sides of the porch for better support; the 

 children also turned their laughter our way. 



" But perhaps one of you kicks in his sleep ? . . . We 

 don't. . . . Come inside. I dare say you are tired. . . . 

 Good-night, John. Now, children, up with you." 



I think they were the most excellent pair of man and 

 woman I ever saw. Both were of a splendid physical 

 type, she the more energetic, black-haired, black-eyed, 

 plump and tall and straight; he the more enduring, fair- 

 haired and bearded, blue-eyed, hardly her equal in height, 

 certainly not in words. In forty years neither had over- 

 powered the other. They had not even agreed to take 

 separate paths, but like two school-boys, new friends, they 

 could afford to contend together in opinions without fear 

 of damage or of lazy truce. He had ploughed and sowed 

 and reaped : she had borne him seven children, had baked 

 and churned and stitched. They had loved sweet things 

 together, and, with curses at times, their children and the 

 land. Physical strength and purity — that were in them 

 the whole of morality — seemed to have given them that 

 equality with the conditions of life which philosophy has 



