Others, going by, chaffed him. "You bin there all night, then?"
About a quarter past six he went back home, and met his neighbour Noah.
"Hullo!" says Noah. "What? You bin at work?"
"Ah, and so you ought to ha' bin."
But Noah, who has lived in London, "sits up till eleven or twelve at night readin' the paper. He can't git into the habit of gettin' up early."
Gardening talk is now the staple conversation in the village, and the public-house is the club-room where the discussions take place, the times being Saturday night and Sunday.
"You don't find many there any other time," says Bettesworth. "Cert'nly, after a man bin to work all day, when he gits home he's tired, and wants to go to bed. But Saturday night and Sunday—well, you can't bide indoors solitary, lookin' at the fire. If you do, you never learns nothin'. But to go and have a glass and a pipe where there's others—that sims to enlighten your mind."
The men compare notes, and give and take sage advice. "Where I had that crop o' dwarf peas last year I be goin' to have carrots this," says one. Another answers, "Well, then, if I was you, I should dig that ground up now—rake off the stones" (carrots being "a very tender herbage"). "Then, if it comes rain, that'll settle it a bit. After that, let it bide an' settle for about another fortnight, and then as soon as you gets a shower shove 'em in as fast as you mind."
"Or else," Bettesworth explains in telling me this, "if you don't let it settle the drill sows 'em too deep; it sinks in. Carrots is a thing you wants to sow as shallow as ever you can."
Somebody informs the company that he had "quarter of a acre o' carrots last year, and he made five pound of 'em." Or was it that he had five tons, and sold them for thirty shillings a ton? This was it, as Bettesworth at last remembers.