"I dunno. Strangers--she and a man with her. 'Iss he a gentilman?' she
says. I can't _bear_ for people to be inquisitive. What should she
want to know all about you for? Might ha' knowed you wasn't a lady.
There, I was _bound_ to give her closure, askin' me such a silly
question!"
"What were they doing down here?"
"They was down here hookin' down blackberries with a stick. And then
come askin' me a silly question like that! _Silly_ questions! I don't
see what people wants to ast 'em for. She went off 'long o' the man,
huggin' up close to him, an' twistin' herself about. Dunno how to walk
nor yet talk! 'Iss he a gentilman!'"
_November 10, 1901._--Two odd words--one of them perhaps newly coined
for the occasion, the other misused--were the reason for my preserving
a short note which brings us to November, and shows us Bettesworth
proposing to himself a task appropriate to the season. The sap was
dying down in the trees; the fruit bushes had lost their leaves, and
stood ready for winter, and their arrangement offended Bettesworth's
taste. He would have had the garden formal and orderly, if he had been
able.
"I thought I'd take up them currant bushes," he said, "and put 'em in
again in rotation"--in a straight row, he meant, as he went on to
explain. "They'd look better than all jaggled about, same as they be
now."
And so the currant-bushes, which until then were "jaggled," or
zig-zagged about, were duly moved, and stand to this day in a line. At
that time he could still see a currant-bush, and criticize its
position.
_November 22._--Towards fallen leaves, it is recorded a little later,
he preserved a constant animosity. His patient sweepings and
grumblings were one of the notes of early winter for me--"the
slovenliest time of all the year," he used to say.
He even doubted that leaves made a good manure, and he quoted
authorities in support of his own opinion. Had not a gardener in the
town said that he, for his part, always burnt the leaves, as soon as
they were dry enough to burn, because "they be reg'lar poison to the
ground"? Or, "if you opens a hole and puts in a bushel or two to form
mould, they got to bide three years, an' _then_ you got to mix other
earth with 'em." As litter for pigs, he admitted, dead leaves were
useful; yet should the cleanings of the pigsty be afterwards heaped up
and allowed to dry, the first wind would "purl the leaves about all
over the place.... And that makes me think there en't much _in_ 'em,"
or surely they would rot?
But unquestionably leaves make good dry litter. "My old gal" (so the
discourse proceeded)--"my old gal used to go out an' get 'em," so that
the pig might have a dry bed; in which care the "old gal" contrasted
nobly with "Will Crawte down 'ere," who had little pigs at this time
"up to their belly in slurry." They could not thrive--Bettesworth was
satisfied of that. His wife, in the days of her strength, would "go
out on to the common, tearin' up moth or rowatt with her hands--her
hands was harder 'n mine--and she'd tear up moth or rowatt or
anything," to make a clean bed for the pig.
I suppose that by "moth" he meant moss. "Rowatt" is old grass which
has never been cut, but has run to seed and turned yellow. With regard
to rowatt, it makes a good litter and a tolerable manure, said
Bettesworth; with this drawback, however, that "if you gets it wi' the
seed on," however much it may have been trampled in the pigsty, "'tis
bound to come up when you spreads the manure on the ground."