CHILDREN OF EARTH 201 



The man who lives under that roof and was born there 

 seventy years ago is like his house. He is short and 

 immensely broad, black-haired, with shaved but never 

 clean-shaven face creased by a wide mouth and long, 

 narrow black eyes — black with a blackness as of cold, 

 deep water that had never known the sun but only the 

 candle-light of discoverers. His once grey corduroys and 

 once white slop are stained and patched to something like 

 the colour of the moist, channelled thatch and crumbling 

 " clunch " of the stone walls. He wears a soft felt hat 

 with hanging broad brim of darker earthy hues; it might 

 have been drawn over his face and ears in his emergence 

 from his native clay and flint. Only rarely does his eye 

 — one eye at a time — gloom out from underneath, always 

 accompanied by a smile that slowly puckers the wrinkled 

 oak-bark of his stiff cheeks. His fingers, his limbs, his 

 face, his silence, suggest crooked oak timber or the 

 gnarled stoles of the many times polled ash. It is barely 

 credible that he grew out of a child, the son of a woman, 

 and not out of the earth itself, like the great flints that 

 work upwards and out on to the surface of the fields. 

 Doubtless he did, but like many a ruined castle, like his 

 own house, he has been worn to a part of the earth itself. 

 That house he will never give up except by force, to go 

 to workhouse or grave. They want him to go out for a 

 few days that it may be made more weather-tight; but 

 he fears the chances and prefers a rickety floor and 

 draughty wall. He is half cowman, half odd-job man — 

 at eight shillings a week — in his last days, mending 

 hedges, cleaning ditches, and carrying a sack of wheat 

 down the steep hill on a back that cannot be bent any 

 farther. Up to his knees in the February ditch, or cutting 



