'Look here,' said he. 'Do you see all these? How much meat is on them? How long would it take you to eat them? Whilst you were eating, others would be coming—that is the way of Nature. Nature outstrips us; it shovels in with both hands, whilst we take out with one—so is it, anyhow, in the Fens. What is another cut off a round of beef to such as me?'
Then he strode to the stables, threw open the door, and said, 'There are stalls for horses; there is hay in the loft to feed them, oats in the bins to nourish them. What odds to me if there be one more horse in the stalls? Here!' he called to one of his men. 'Take the Cheap Jack horse out of the van-shafts again and bring him to this stable.'
Zita endeavoured to free herself from his grasp.
'No,' said Drownlands; 'you have not seen all. You have been about the world, I daresay; seen plenty of sights; but there is one thing you have not seen before,—a fen-farm,—and it is a sight to unseal your eyes. Come along with me.'
He held her wrist with the grip of a vice, and now drew her in the direction of the kitchen.
'Look!' said he. 'What is that? That is our fuel. That is turf. What do we pay for keeping ourselves warm in winter? Nothing. I have heard say that some folks pay a pound and even forty shillings for a ton of sea-coal. And for wood they will pay a guinea a load. We pay nothing. The fuel lies under our feet. We take off a spit of earth, and there it is for the digging, some ten—fifteen—twenty feet of it. It costs us no more than the labour of taking up. Do I want a bit of brass? I go to market, and say I have ten acres of turf to sell at sixty pounds an acre. A dozen hands are held up. I get six hundred pounds at once. That is what I call making money. Come on. You have not seen all yet.'
He drew her farther. He pulled her up the steps to the door, then turned, and, pointing to a large field in which were mounds of clay at short intervals, he said—
'Do you see that? What is done elsewhere when land is hungry, and demands a dressing? Lime is brought to fertilise the exhausted soil. We in the Fens never spend a shilling thus. If we desire dressing, we dig under the turf, and there it lies—rich, fat clay—and spread that over the surface. That is what it is to have a fen-farm. Come within now.'