How bowed the woods beneath their sturdy stroke."
--GRAY'S _Elegy_.


Jarge was one of the most prominent characters among my men. He was
not a native of the Vale, coming from the Lynches, a hilly district to
the north of Evesham. He was a sturdy and very excellent workman. He
did with his might whatsoever his hand found to do, and everything he
undertook was a success. The beautifully trimmed hedge in front of his
cottage-garden proclaimed his method and love of order at a glance.
Jarge was a wag; he was the man who, like Shakespeare's clowns,
stepped on to the stage at the critical moment and saved a serious
situation with a quaint or epigrammatic expression.

He was very scornful of the condition of the farm when I came, and it
was he, whose reply to the late tenant that his arable land would soon
be all grass, I have already quoted. In speaking to me, at almost our
first interview, he could not refrain from an allusion to the foulness
of the land; some peewits were circling over those neglected fields,
and it was far from reassuring to be told--though he did not intend to
discourage me--that "folks say, when you sees them things on the land,
the farm's broke!"

From the natural history point of view he was perfectly correct, as
peewits generally frequent wild and uncultivated places where the
ploughman and the labourer are rarely seen.

Owing to the somewhat unconvincing fact of his wife's brother being a
gamekeeper on the Marquis's estate near Jarge's native village, he had
acquired, and retained through all the years of my farming, a sporting