The tenant of the Manor Farm was a good specimen of his class; a
thorough Saxon, ruddy and bright visaged, with an athletic though rather
bulky frame, hardened by exposure to the seasons and constant exercise.
Although he was the tenant of several hundred acres, he had an eye to
the main chance in little things, which is a characteristic of farmers,
but he was good-natured and obliging, and while he foraged their pony,
furnished their woodyard with logs and faggots, and supplied them from
his dairy, he gratuitously performed for the family at the hall many
other offices which tended to their comfort and convenience, but which
cost him nothing.

Mr. Ferrars liked to have a chat every now and then with Farmer
Thornberry, who had a shrewd and idiomatic style of expressing his
limited, but in its way complete, experience of men and things, which
was amusing and interesting to a man of the world whose knowledge of
rural life was mainly derived from grand shooting parties at great
houses.

The pride and torment of Farmer Thornberry's life was his only child,
Job.

"I gave him the best of educations," said the farmer; "he had a much
better chance than I had myself, for I do not pretend to be a scholar,
and never was; and yet I cannot make head or tail of him. I wish you
would speak to him some day, sir. He goes against the land, and yet we
have been on it for three generations, and have nothing to complain of;
and he is a good farmer, too, is Job, none better; a little too fond of
experimenting, but then he is young. But I am very much afraid he will
leave me. I think it is this new thing the big-wigs have set up in
London that has put him wrong, for he is always reading their papers."