"

So his work varies, week after week. From one job to another up and down
the valley he goes, not listlessly and fatigued, but taking a sober
interest in all he does. You can see in him very well how his
forefathers went about their affairs, for he is plainly a man after
their pattern. His day's work is his day's pleasure. It is changeful
enough, and calls for skill enough, to make it enjoyable to him.
Furthermore, things on either side of it--things he learnt to understand
long ago--make their old appeal to his senses as he goes about, although
his actual work is not concerned with them. In the early summer--he had
come to mow a little grass plot for me--I found him full of a boyish
delight in birds and birds'-nests. A pair of interesting birds had
arrived; at any time in the day they could be seen swooping down from
the branch of a certain apple-tree and back again to their
starting-place without having touched the ground. "Flycatchers!" said
Turner exultantly. "I shall ha' to look about. They got their nest
somewhere near, you may be sure o' that! A little wisp o' grass
somewhere in the clunch (fork) of a tree ..." (his glance wandered
speculatively round in search of a likely place) "that's where they
builds. Ah! look now! There he goes again! Right in the clunch you'll
find their nest, and as many as ten young 'uns in'n.... Yes, I shall be
bound to find where he is afore I done with it."

The next day, hard by where he was at work, an exclamation of mine drew
him to look at a half-fledged bird, still alive, lying at the foot of a
nut-tree. "H'm: so 'tis. A young blackbird," he said pitifully. The next
moment he had the bird in his hand. "Where can the nest be, then? Up in
that nut? Well, to be sure! Wonders I hadn't seen that afore now. That's
it though, 'pend upon it; right up in the clunch o' that bough." Before
I could say a word he was half-way up amongst the branches, long-legged
and struggling, to put the bird back into its nest.

As he has always lived in the valley, he is full of memories of it, and
especially early memories; recalling the comparative scantiness of its
population when he was a boy, and the great extent of the common; and
the warm banks where hedgehogs abounded--hedgehogs which his father used
to kill and cook; and the wells of good water, so few and precious that
each had its local name. For instance, "Butcher's Well" (so-called to
this day, he says) "was where Jack Butcher used to live