“Mistress Dale,” said the doctor, “as for your great lad here, I fear he must leave me. For look you, he is a man already in size, a regular Anak, and towers head and shoulders above his fellows.”
“As he does above me, sir,” said my mother with a smile.
“Yea, and above me, his master. Well, dame, but the lad’s heart is always with ye here, and his head is always running on sheep and cattle, turnip and wheat, sowing and reaping. And so now, having made him into a fair scholar, let him set to and make a better farmer.”
“I trust he has done his duty, sir?” said my mother.
“He hath been a good lad, mistress, a good lad indeed. For if he hath been slow he hath made sure, which is high praise. Yea, I am well enough pleased with thee, Will, and wish thee well.”
And so I was fairly entered upon my life’s business, which, as I understood it, was to do my duty to the land which my fathers had left me and hand it forward to my successors even better than when I found it. I need not tell you that I entered into my new mode of life with great eagerness. A proud lad I was when my mother bought me a new horse whereon to ride about the farm, and fitted me up in addition with a new saddle and bridle. My old schoolmates envied me not a little when they saw my new estate. They, too, were leaving school and going into the world, but none of them were thrown into such pleasant occupation as mine. I at least thought so, and so I believe did they. For Jack Drumbleforth was going to Oxford, so that he might in time become a parson, and Tom Thorpe had been articled to Mr. Hook the lawyer, and would henceforth have to live amongst the parchment and ink, while poor Ben Tuckett, meeting the worst fate of all, was apprenticed to a grocer of Pontefract, and liked the prospect ill.
“You are the one to be envied, Will,” said Jack Drumbleforth, “for you will be able to breathe fresh air every minute of the day if you are so minded, while I am poring over old books and while Tom is hunting ancient parchments and poor Ben is frying in the grocer’s shop. However, lads, ’tis all in a life and will be all the same a hundred years hence. I dare say we shall all meet again sooner or later.”
But with Jack Drumbleforth we did not meet often during the next few years, for he presently went away to Oxford and was entered at one of the colleges, and only came home to see his father once a year in the summer time. But Tom Thorpe and Ben Tuckett used to come to Dale’s Field often, for they were both apprenticed in Pontefract, and it was a pleasant walk across the meadows, so that they both took to coming every Sunday, and we made them heartily welcome and looked for them as a regular thing. And in the summer, when Jack Drumbleforth was at home, we had some gay meetings, for Jack was always full of life and suffered no one to be dull in his presence. He would come and stay all day in our harvest-field, eating and drinking with me and the men, and making merry with all until the sun set. And we always held our harvest-home supper before the time came for Jack to go back to his college, for he professed that he lived upon the remembrance of it for all the succeeding winter.
So the years went on, quietly and uneventfully for us at Dale’s Field. Time had somewhat healed our great sorrow, though it could never wholly destroy it. My mother had grown resigned, even happy again, and she took great pride in her children. Lucy was growing a fine girl by that time, and was a great help in the house, for she seemed to possess my mother’s clever ways, and was an adept at all domestic matters of preserving and baking and cooking and so forth. She was growing up not unlike my mother, that is to say, she was a tall, well-made girl with pleasant features and kind eyes and brown hair, which I believe Master Ben Tuckett learnt to admire even in our school days. For Lucy was Ben’s goddess, and he would fetch and carry for her like any dog. Nay, it dawned upon me as time went on that Ben had fallen in love with Lucy, such signs did he sometimes show of it. And I minded not, for I loved them both, and Ben was a good fellow. But I said naught of it even to my mother, being minded to let matters take their course.
In the year in which I came of age our harvest was an uncommonly favourable one. We had warm and nourishing rains in spring and abundant sunshine afterwards, and the corn had sprung and shot and ripened and was ready for the scythe by the end of July. And for many a week after that we had favourable weather, for day after day dawned bright and hot, and our men were in the fields early and late, cutting the grain with scythe and sickle, and binding and setting up the sheaves in long rows across the stubble. We had not, I think, a shower of rain during all that time of ingathering, and we were pleased and thankful that we should have such a favourable harvest.
