"Besides," David went on, "you see I was party to the arrangement—that is, I accepted the conditions; but the luck has been on Sir John's side."
"He took a mean advantage of you, father, and you know it, and he knows it," Ralph snapped.
"He knew that I had set my heart on a bit of land that I could call my own; that I wanted a sort of resting-place in my old age, and that I desired to end my days in the parish in which I was born."
"And so he put the screw on. It's always been a wonder to me, since I could think about it at all, that you accepted the conditions. I would have seen Sir John at the bottom of the sea first."
"I did try to get better terms," David answered, looking wistfully across the fields, "and I mentioned ninety-nine years as the term of the lease, and he nearly turned me out of his office. 'Three lives or nothing,' he snarled, 'and be quick about it.' So I had to make up my mind there and then."
"You'd have been better off, father, if you'd dropped all your money down a mine shaft, and gone to work on a farm as a day labourer," Ralph said bitterly.
"I shouldn't have had to work so hard," David assented.
"And you would have got more money, and wouldn't have had a hundredth part of the anxiety."
"You see, I thought the land was richer than it has turned out to be, and the furze roots have kept sprouting year after year, and that has meant ploughing the fields afresh. And the amount of manure I have had to put in has handicapped me terribly. But I have kept hoping to get into smooth waters by and by. The farm is looking better now than ever it did before."
"But the ground rent, father, is an outrage. Did you really understand how much you were paying?"