“Well,” said the squire laughing, “what have you been doing in that half acre of close beside your house?”
“That! Oh, only planted it with pear-trees so as to make a bit of an orchard!”
“Are you going to pick a crop of pears next year, neighbour?”
“Next year! Bah! They’ll be ten years before they come well into bearing.” (This was the case with the old-fashioned grafting.)
“So will the acres laid bare by the draining,” said the squire smiling, “and I hope we shall live to see our boys eating the bread made from corn grown on that patch of water and reeds, along with the pears from your trees.”
“That’s a clincher,” said the farmer. “You’ve coot the ground from under me, neighbour, and I wean’t grudge the money any more.”
“I wish father wouldn’t say coot and wean’t!” whispered Tom, whose school teaching made some of the homely expressions and bits of dialect of the fen-land jar.
“Why not? What does it matter?” said Dick, who was busy twisting the long hairs from a sorrel nag’s tail into a fishing-line.
“Sounds so broad. Remember how the doctor switched Bob Robinson for saying he’d been agate early.”
“Yes, I recollect,” said Dick, tying a knot to keep the hairs from untwisting; “and father said he ought to have been ashamed of himself, for agate was good old Saxon, and so were all the words our people use down here in the fen. I say, what are they talking about now?”