As it is not mentioned elsewhere, I may as well say here that Bettesworth's endeavours to make this little place habitable and respectable were for a time fairly successful. As it should have been explained, after emerging from the gully the public footpath runs close in front of the doorway of the place, leaving some eight feet of garden between itself and the stream. Of old, in the Irishman's time, this garden was an entanglement of weeds and stunted cabbages, while the footpath was unswept, disgusting, and often blocked with a pail of ashes or other household refuse. But now a spirit of order had appeared on the scene. The cabbage-plot became comely; in due season old-fashioned cottage flowers--pinks and nasturtiums--appeared in two tiny borders under the windows on either side of the door, and the mean doorway itself was beautified by a rough but sufficient arbour of larch-posts before it, up which "canary-creeper" found its way. Accordingly, I heard from time to time, but neglected to set down, how this and that wayfarer had praised the old man's improvements. Did not the Vicar himself say (I seem to remember Bettesworth's telling me so with much gratification) that he would never have believed the place could be made to look so well? Of the inside, perhaps, not so much could be said; but even this was passable at first, before the old wife's breakdown spoilt all. For several years, in fact, Bettesworth was, I believe, very happy in this cottage. At any rate, it gave him scope for labour, and he always liked that. He had hardly been in possession a week before he was talking of an improvement much to his mind.
"There's a rare lot o' capital soil in the lake under they withies just against my garden," he said; and he proposed taking it out to enrich his garden.
"It'll be good for the lake, too," I suggested.
"Yes," he replied, "it wants clearin' out. Why, in some places there en't no lake, and half the water that comes down got to overflow and make floods."
And now, Bettesworth being settled in this hovel, his story begins at last to move forwards. For a while, indeed, little, if any, change in the man himself will be discernible. We shall be aware only of the quiet lapse of time as the seasons steal over him, and leave him older, or as the progress of public events is dimly reflected in occasional scraps of his conversation. And even of public events not much will be heard. Such things, which had never greatly concerned Bettesworth, were less likely than ever to attract his attention now. For five days in the week he rarely got farther from home than the lower half of the lane, where it degenerates into the gully between my garden and his cottage. On Saturday afternoons he journeyed into the town to get a shave and do his shopping; on Sunday evenings he generally went to the public-house; and as this was all he saw of the world, it is no matter for surprise if his interests remained extremely parochial.