During the next few days the most remarkable sight at Worge was Harry’s industriousness. For nearly a week he rose at five, fed the pigs and helped with the milking, and during the whole day he was available for carting, digging, dunging, or anything else he had formerly fled from. He helped Elphick spray the young fuggles down by Forges and the Sunk Field, he took a cartload of roots over to Three Cups Corner, he groomed [72] the horses and plaited their manes, he compelled Zacky with threats of personal violence to spend Saturday afternoon scaring birds from the gooseberries, instead of, with six other little boys, carrying out an enveloping movement on Punnetts Town, with three-ha’pence to spend on sweets in the captured citadel. On the occasion of Mus’ Beatup’s next lapse, he stalled the cows and doctored the mare, and also, with much foresight, took off and hid his father’s boots, which prevented both his going to bed in them and his throwing them at his wife.

It would have been well if this virtuous state could have lasted till the hay harvest. This was early, for there was a spell of heat in May, and the fields were soon parched. The air was full of the smell of ripe hayseed, of the baking glumes of the oats, of the hot, sickly stew of elderflower and meadowsweet. Along the Four Roads eddies of dust flew from under the wheels and caked the grass and fennel-heads beside the way, and in the ruts of the little lanes the bennet and rest-barrow sprouted, with the thick-stalked sprawly pignut, and ragged robin. Unfortunately, all this scent and heat made Harry remember a wood over by Cade Street, where he had once lain and watched the moon rise rusty beyond Lobden’s House. It was unfortunate that he had such a memory, for it had more than once been his undoing. Somewhere under Harry’s skin, mixed with the sluggish currents of his country blood, was a strain of poetry and imagination. He cared nothing for books, nothing for beauty, nothing for music (except, perhaps, when they sang “Diadem” in the Bethel at dusk), and yet every now and then something would pull him from the earth he toiled on—a thing he was unaware of three weeks out of the four, seeing only the sods cleaving together—something would call him from meadow-hills that swept up their broomy cones to the sky, an adventure wou............