FORE:"But��as experience has taught you��they won't. You can see now what your slave-driving's brought you to��you've lost your slaves.""Chivalrous, humane man!��well, anyhow I'm not anyone you can beat, so I dare ask��is it worth while?"

FORE:"But we've got a boy, Reuben. It would be nice to have a girl now."An execration passed between Oakley's teeth��he sprang upon Tyler, and had not the smith dexterously raised his left arm and arrested the blow, Black Jack's dagger would have been buried in his bosom.

FORE:He took her hand, and forgot to be angry because she had laughed.

FORE:The next few weeks were for Reuben full of bitter, secret humiliation. He might show a proud face and a straight back to the world, but his heart was full of miserable madness. It was not so much his son's disgrace that afflicted him as the attitude of people towards it��the Bardons with their regrets and apologies, the small fry with their wonder and cheap blame. What filled him with rage and disgust beyond all else was the thought that some people imagined that Robert had disgraced Odiam��as if a fool like Robert, with his tinpot misdoings, had it in his power to disgrace a farm like Odiam! This idea maddened him at times, and he went to absurd lengths to show men how little he cared. Yet everywhere he seemed to see pity leering out of eyes, he seemed to see lips inaudibly forming the words: "poor fellow"��"what a blow for his schemes!"��"how about the farm?��now he'll lie low for a bit."At last the gods, who are more open-handed than ungrateful people suppose, took pity on the rivals, and gave them something to fight about. The pretext was in itself trivial, but when the gunpowder is laid nothing bigger than a match is needed. This particular pretext was a barrow of roots which had been ordered from Kitchenhour by Reuben and sent by mistake to Grandturzel. Realf's shepherd, not seeing any cause for doubt, gave the roots as winter fodder to his ewes, and said nothing about them. When Reuben tramped over to Kitchenhour and asked furiously why his roots had never been sent, the mistake was discovered. He came home by Grandturzel, and found his precious roots, all thrown out on the fields, being nibbled by Realf's ewes.

FORE:Rose was not sorry to see the last of Benjamin, whom she had always despised as a coarse lumpkinish youth, whose clothes smelt strongly either of pitch or manure. But she dreaded breaking the news to Reuben. She disliked her husband's rages, and now she would have to let one loose. Then suddenly she thought of something, and a little smile dimpled the corners of her mouth.Then in winter came the lambing, which is the shepherd's Lent. Richard and the old man from Doozes kept long vigils in the lambing hut, and those nights and days were to young Backfield dreams of red, fuggy solitude, the stillness broken only by the slip of coals in the brazier, or the faint bleating of the ewes outside��while sometimes mad Harry's fiddle wept down the silences of Boarzell.

FORE: