258 FIELD AND HEDGEROW. 
from the downs: it was old Hobbes’s, whose affairs he 
had known these forty years. Another, with wheat, was 
Lambourne’s team: he lost heavily in 1879, the wet 
year. The family and business concerns of every man 
of any substance were as well known to the squire as if 
they had been written in a chronicle. So, too, he knew 
the family tendency, as it were, of the cottagers. So 
and So’s lads were always tall, another’s girls always 
tidy. If you employed a member of this family, you 
were sure to be well served ; if of another, you were sure 
to be cheated in some way. Men vary like trees: an 
ash sapling is always straight, the bough of an oak 
crooked, a fir full of knots. A man, said the squire, 
should be straight like a gun. This section of the high- 
way gave him the daily news of the village as the daily 
papers give us ‘the news of the world. About two 
hundred yards from the window the row of limes began, 
each tree as tall and large as an elm, having grown to 
its full natural size. The last of the row came very near 
obstructing the squire’s line of sight, and it once chanced 
that some projecting branches by degrees stretched out 
across his field of view. This circumstance caused him 
much mental trouble ; for, having all his life consistently 
opposed any thinning out or trimming of trees, he did 
not care to issue an order which would almost confess 
a mistake. Besides which, why only these particular 
branches ?—the object would be so apparent. The 
squire, while conversing with Ettles, twice, as if uncon- 
sciously, directed his steps beneath these limes, and, 
striking the offending boughs with his stick, remarked 
that they grew extremely fast. But the keeper, usually 
so keen to take a hint, only answered that the lime was 
the quickest wood to grow of which he knew. In his 
heart he enjoyed the squire’s difficulty. Finally the 
