aged allotment and regular wages, he saved a good bit of
money. When I sold my fruit crops by auction, on the trees, for the
buyers to pick, just before I gave up my land, as I should not be
present to harvest the late apples and cider fruit after Michaelmas,
he came forward with a bid of one hundred pounds for one of the
orchards, though it was sold eventually for a higher price.

He was not well versed in finance, however, for when the owner of his
cottage offered, at his request, to build a new pigsty if he would pay
a rent of 5 per cent, annually on the cost--a very fair
proposal--Jarge declined with scorn, being, I think, under the
impression that the owner was demanding the complete sum of five
pounds annually, and I found it impossible to disabuse his mind of the
idea. He felt aggrieved also by the fact that, having paid rent for
twenty-five or thirty years, he was no nearer ownership of his cottage
than when he began. His argument was that, as he had paid more than
the value of the cottage, it should be his property; the details of
interest on capital and all rates and repairs paid by the owner did
not appeal to him.

On the occasion of a concert at Malvern, which my wife and her sister
organized for the benefit of our church restoration fund, I gave all
my men a holiday, and sent them off by train at an early hour; they
were to climb the Worcestershire Beacon--the highest point of the
Malvern range--in the morning, and attend the concert in the
afternoon. It was a lovely day, and the programme was duly carried
out. Next morning I found Jarge and another man, who had been detailed
for the day's work to sow nitrate of soda on a distant wheat-field,
sitting peacefully under the hedge; they told me that the excitement
and the climb had completely tired them out, but that they would stop
and complete the job, no matter how late at night that might be. It
was the hill-climbing, I think, that had brought into play muscles not
generally used in our flat country. I sympathized, and left them
resting, but the work was honourably concluded before they left the
field.

When there was illness in Jarge's house and somebody told him that the
doctor had been seen leaving, he answered that he "Would sooner see
the butcher there any day"--not, perhaps, a very happy expression in
the circumstances, but intended to convey that a butcher's bill, for
good meat supplied, was more satisfactory than a doctor's account,
which repres