"I doan't want to fight thee," said Isaac at length, "but I be thinking
'twould be best to take thee home." And suddenly dashing in he seized
Jarvis round the waist with one arm, grasped him round the legs with the
other, and flung the big man across his shoulder, and carried him off,
struggling and shouting, to his cottage. There at the door, pale and
distressed, stood the poor wife waiting for her lord, when Isaac
arrived, and going straight in dropped the smith down on his own floor,
and with the remark, "Here be your man," walked off to his cottage and
his tea.

The other powerful man was Old Joe the collier, who flourished and was
known in every village in the Salisbury Plain district during the first
thirty-five years of the last century. I first heard of this once famous
man from Caleb, whose boyish imagination had been affected by his
gigantic figure, mighty voice, and his wandering life over all that wide
world of Salisbury Plain. Afterwards when I became acquainted with a
good many old men, aged from 75 to 90 and upwards, I found that Old
Joe's memory is still green in a good many villages of the district,
from the upper waters of the Avon to the borders of Dorset. But it is
only these ancients who knew him that keep it green; by and by when they
are gone Old Joe and his neddies will be remembered no more.

In those days--down to about 1840, it was customary to burn peat in the
cottages, the first cost of which was about four and sixpence the
wagon-load--as much as I should require to keep me warm for a month in
winter; but the cost of its conveyance to the villages of the Plain was
about five to six shillings per load, as it came from a considerable
distance, mostly from the New Forest. How the labourers at that time,
when they were paid seven or eight shillings a week, could afford to buy