"But—that's the hospital. Then you're wounded,"—I glanced at his gold stripes—"or still sick?"
"That doesn't follow. What I mean is that it's my house."
"Then you turned it into a hospital?"
"No," replied this puzzling young man quietly. Then added, as if he were speaking to one of his own soldiers: "Come along. Time's up! Take a turn with the spade again. And see if you can make the wheelbarrow go up easily next journey."
As I took up the spade again he strolled out of the shed. I thought he was not even going to have the manners to bid me good morning. But he turned his face, and said laughingly over his shoulder:
"Au revoir—unless you mean to jack up before I see you again?"
Without waiting for a reply, he crossed the yard towards the farmhouse.
I went on with my so-far-from-romantic task, a little surprised to find that there did seem to be something in what this Captain Holiday had said about handling spades and wheeling barrows. His was the better way, after all. I tried to follow it. I still found the unusual exercise was labour; but it was not altogether the struggle that it had been at my first ignorant and violent efforts.
I worked, getting more flushed and moist and dishevelled as the cleared space on the slate floor grew—very gradually—larger.
There—I'd managed to tip the barrow over quite neatly that time. I wished I could turn through that cow-house the canal of which I saw the silver blink between meadows beyond the stack-roofs. That would be "making Nature work for one" with a vengeance!