A\ 
aie WITH A DEVONSE Tia 
Pf AON en 
BY ARTEOUR GOOD RIG 
PHOTOGRAPHS BY THE 
I start up out of the luxurious, en- 
folding feather bed at the rat-tat-tat 
of Sally’s knuckles on the door. \Her foot- 
steps echo down the oil-clothed ‘floor of 
the landing, and from somewhere beneath 
the sun-patched blind I can hear Farmer 
Hodge’s voice giving laconic orders. And 
with mingled reluctance and pride at such 
I is half-past five in themorning when 
early rising, I slip out upon the soft sheep-\ 
skins that litter the cold floor. 
Rat-a-tat-tat. ere is Sally again with 
my hot water. A most extraordinary girl 
is Sally. She is only twenty, but her 
father and mother, Somerset people, have 
both been dead for some time and Sally is 
“workin’ out.” She admits being very 
fond of all the arts. Her “favorite” songs 
are “The Holy City” and “My Daddy Is 
a Gentleman.” She is not certain which 
she likes the better, but she prefers them 
both to “The Lost Chord.’”’ As for books 
she abominates dull reading, but she loves 
great masterpieces like ““Lady Audley’s 
Secret.”” She has a secret passion for the 
“dramer,”’ but she says she cried so hard 
when she saw “The Worst Woman in 
London” at Plymouth that she fairly 
dreads going again. Sally has been up to 
London once, and she has a startling imi- 
tation Park Lane accent not unlike that 
which patriotic Americans occasionally 
smuggle through the New York custom- 
house. Sally receives five dollars a month 
in wages and works hard, although she is 
conscious of being above her position. 
Farmer Hodges has only had the tenancy 
of Hillscott Farm for some dozen years 
“come Michaelmas”—the beginning and 
end of yearly rentings. Before that he and 
his fathers before him for some four hun- 
AUTHOR AND OTHERS 
dred years fought rougher land over on 
the edge of Dartmoor, a few miles away. 
Some success with breeding ponies, how- 
ever, brought him money enough to rent 
the three hundred odd acres of Hillscott 
from the man who owns most of the land 
for miles around, who builds the stout gray, 
stone slate-roofed houses and stables and 
puts his crest over the front door, and who 
has the giving of the “living” (the appoint- 
‘ment of the preacher) at the church in the 
nearest town, three miles away. Hodges, 
of \course, pays all the local taxes—and 
they. are many—while the landlord pays 
the church tax and the state tax and the 
income tax and insures the property. And 
Hodges pays from three dollars to twenty- 
five dollars an acre for the land, about two- 
thirds of which grows crops, while the rest 
is orchard and pasture land. The farm- 
hands, half a dozen in number, live in 
solid little cottages on the road below with 
their own potato patch at their back door. 
Hodges pays them about four dollars a 
week and furnishes them fuel and cider. 
Much of this Hodges tells me in inter- 
-mittent jerks of volubility while he and 
Jeemes, the boy, milk the ten or a dozen 
cows in the sheds, and feed and water the 
stock, and turn out the sheep and cows and 
calves into pasture in broad fields beyond 
the sheds or in broader fields far down the 
road. He is by nature a silent man bred 
in the silences of the moor, but his pride 
stirs his tongue now and then over his new 
American machinery and the yield of his 
broad acres, over which he toils from dawn 
till dark in spite of his seventy-five years. 
This is his world and he never has been out’ 
of it even as far as Exeter or Plymouth. 
He is proud of his cows, South Devons, and 
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