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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 valley, even what used to be the river
bed before they irrigated, to be under wheat--as it is this
year--twenty-five feet high. They used the old-fashioned scythe here
twenty years ago, and they would bring home the harvest on a
wain--rejoicing--in a simple honest fashion. A little simple
drunkenness, a little frank love-making, to conclude ... poor dear Lady
Wondershoot--she didn't like these Innovations. Very conservative, poor
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