ching a fellow to farm--the few who do are generally just the ones
who can't teach him anything at all. And, finally, every word I said to
you the other day I meant. So if you're inclined to stay on here and
pick up your knowledge of the life and experience of the country by
helping us, why this place is your home for just as long as ever you
like to make it so."

"Rather," appended Brian in his quietly emphatic way. "Give us a fill,
dad," reaching out a hand for the paternal pouch.

I have but a confused idea of what I said in reply, probably something
incoherent, as my way is when genuinely moved, possibly because that is
a mental process I so seldom undergo. Anyhow, the matter was settled to
the satisfaction of all parties, which was the main thing.

CHAPTER ELEVEN.

THE OBJECTIONABLE TRASK.

Now as I sat there, that still and radiant afternoon, in the sylvan
wildness of our shaded resting-place, whose cool gloom contrasted well
with the golden warmth of the sunlight beyond, I was rather more
disposed for silence than speech. I was thinking, and the subject
matter of my thoughts was all unalloyed with any misgiving of foreboding
that should tarnish its brightness. I was realising Beryl's presence,
and all that it meant to me. There she was, within a couple of yards of
me, and the mere consciousness of this was all-sufficing. I was
contrasting, too, this wondrous change which had come into my life--such
a joy of living, such a new awakening to its possibilities. It seemed I
was hardly the same man. I who had hitherto gone through life in a
neutral-tinted sort of way, content to exist from day to day among
neutral-tinted surroundings, with, as I thought hitherto, a happy
immunity from all violent interests or emotions. And now, by an almost
magical wave of a wizard wand, I had been transported to this fair land,
to sunlight from gloom, to a golden awakening from a drab slumbrous
acquiescence in a bovine state of existence, which supplied the physical
wants, leaving all others untouched. And the magic which had wrought
this upheaval--

"Well? A penny for your thoughts."

I turned to the speaker. It was perhaps as well that the child was with
us, or I don't know what I might have been led into saying, probably
prematurely, and would thus have tumbled down my own bright castles in
the air.

"He's thinking of his pipe," said Iris mischievously. "Brian always
gets into a brown study too when he'