become quite a florid and vigorous individuality since Mrs. Skinner died. "Since your poor dear grandma was took, there's no abiding you. Don't you arst no questions and you won't be told no lies. If once I was to start out answerin' you serious, y'r father'd 'ave to go and arst some one else for 'is supper—let alone finishin' the washin."
"All right, mother," he would say, after a wondering stare at her. "I didn't mean to worry."
And he would go on thinking.
V
He was thinking too four years after, when the Vicar, now no longer ripe but over-ripe, saw him for the last time of all. You figure the old gentleman visibly a little older now, slacker in his girth, a little coarsened and a little weakened in his thought and speech, with a quivering shakiness in his hand and a quivering shakiness in his convictions, but his eye still bright and merry for all the trouble the Food had caused his village and himself. He had been frightened at times and disturbed, but was he not alive still and the same still?—and fifteen long years, a fair sample of eternity—had turned the trouble into use and wont.
"It was a disturbance, I admit," he would say, "and things are different. Different in many ways. There was a time when a boy could weed, but now a man must go out with axe and crowbar—in some places down by the thickets at least. And it's a little strange still to us old-fashioned people for all this
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