"You'd ha' laughed if you'd ha' bin out here wi' me at dinner-time. A lady come up the lane, wantin' to know who you was. 'Who lives here?' she says." He mimicked a high-pitched and affected voice. "'Mister Bourne,' I says. 'Iss he a gentilman?' she says. 'You don't s'pose he's a lady, do ye?' I says. 'What a beastlie road!' she says, and went off, tip-toein' an' twistin' herself about—dunno how to walk nor talk neither."
I asked who the lady was.
"I dunno. Strangers—she and a man with her. 'Iss he a gentilman?' she says. I can't bear for people to be inquisitive. What should she want to know all about you for? Might ha' knowed you wasn't a lady. There, I was bound to give her closure, askin' me such a silly question!"
"What were they doing down here?"
"They was down here hookin' down blackberries with a stick. And then come askin' me a silly question like that! Silly questions! I don't see what people wants to ast 'em for. She went off 'long o' the man, huggin' up close to him, an' twistin' herself about. Dunno how to walk nor yet talk! 'Iss he a gentilman!'"
November 10, 1901.—Two odd words—one of them perhaps newly coined for the occasion, the other misused—were the reason for my preserving a short note which brings us to November, and shows us Bettesworth proposing to himself a task appropriate to the season. The sap was dying down in the trees; the fruit bushes had lost their leaves, and stood ready for winter, and their arrangement offended Bettesworth's taste. He would have had the garden formal and orderly, if he had been able.
"I thought I'd take up them currant bushes," he said, "and put 'em in again in rotation"—in a straight row, he meant, as he went on to explain. "They'd look better than all jaggled about, same as they be now."
And so the currant-bushes, which until then were "jaggled," or zig-zagged about, were duly moved, and stand to this day in a line. At that time he could still see a currant-bush, and criticize its position.
November 22.—Towards fallen leaves, it is recorded a little later, he preserved a constant animosity. His patient sweepings and grumblings were one of the notes of early winter for me—"the slovenliest time of all the year," he used to say.
He even doubted that leaves made a good manure, and he quoted authorities in support of his own opinion. Had not a gardener in the town said that he, for his part, always burnt the leaves, as soon as they were dry enough to burn, because "they be reg'lar poison to the ground"? Or, "if you opens a hole and puts in a bushel or two to form mould, they got to bide three years, an' then you got to mix other earth with 'em." As litter for pigs, he admitted, dead leaves were useful; yet should the cleanings of the pigsty be afterwards heaped up and allowed to dry, the first wind would "purl the leaves about all over the place.... And that makes me think there en't much in 'em," or surely they would rot?