.

He had finished his cheese and lit a short clay pipe, and thrust his
hands deep in his pockets, when there was a rustling noise in the hedge
a little farther down, and a short man jumped out into the road--even
jumping with his hands in his pockets. He saw Smith directly and came
towards him, and sat himself on a heap of flints used for mending the
road.

"What's thee at to-day?" asked John, after a pause.

"Ditching," said the other laconically, pushing out one foot by way of
illustrating the fact. It was covered with black mud far above the
ankle, and there were splashes of mud up to his waist--his hands, as he
proceeded to light his pipe, were black, too, from the same cause.

"Thee's bin in main deep," said John, after a slow survey of the other's
appearance.

The fellow stamped his boot on the ground, and the slime and slush oozed
out of it and formed a puddle. "That's pretty stuff to stand in for a
man of sixty-four, yent it, John?" With a volubility and energy of
speech little to be expected from his wizened appearance, the hedger and
ditcher entered into details of his job. He began work at six that
morning with stiff legs and swollen feet, and as he stood in the mingled
mire and water, the rheumatism came gradually on, rising higher up his
limbs from the ankles, and growing sharper with every twinge, while the
cold and bitter wind cut through his thin slop on his chest, which was
not so strong as it used to be. His arms got stiff with the labour of
lifting up shovelful after shovelful of heavy mud to plaster the side of
the ditch, his feet turned cold as "flints," and the sickly smell of the
slime upset his stomach so that when he tried to eat his bread and
cheese he could not. Through this speech John smoked steadily on, till
the other stopped and looked at him for sympathy.

"Well, Jim, anyhow," said Smith, "thee hasn't got far to walk to the
job;" and he pointed with the stem of his pipe to the low roof of a
cottage just visible a few hundred yards distant.

"Ay, and a place it be to live in, that," said Jim. There were only two
rooms, he explained, and both downstairs--no upstairs at all--and the
first of these was so small he could reach across it, and the thatch had
got so thin in one place that the rain came through. The floor was only
hard mud, and the garden not big enough to grow a sack of potatoes,
while one wall of the house, which was only "wattle and daub" (_i.e._,
lath and plaster), ro