With a rapidly increasing population empty cottages are scarce, as Bettesworth now found. Moreover, his choice was restricted. There were reasons against his going to the upper end of the valley. It was more newly peopled by labourers from the town, who had never known, or else had lost, the older peasant traditions which Bettesworth could still cherish--in memory, at least--here in the more ancient part of the village. Of course, that was not how he explained his distaste; he only expressed a dislike for the society of the upper valley. "They be a roughish lot up there," he would say. The fact was, he did not know many of them intimately, from which it may be seen how curiously our parish society is disintegrated.
Besides, he wanted a cottage not a mile away, but near to his work, so that he might go home to dinner and see how his wife was getting on. If he was growing old, she was older; and what was worse, she was subject to epileptic fits. There were days when he worried about her all the time while he was at work, and went home uneasily, dreading to find her fallen down in a fit. It was necessary, therefore, that if he moved it should be not far away. His last move had been in the wrong direction--from the adjoining bluff to a hollow further down stream--and now he desired to get back.
One of the steep and narrow lanes mentioned above is that which runs down beside this garden, where Bettesworth's work lay. It is picturesque enough, beneath its deep banks and hedgerows and overhung by my garden trees; but that is of no moment here. Within Bettesworth's memory it afforded access even for a waggon right down to "the Lake," and so over into the meadow opposite; but the last hundred yards of it, from Mrs. Skinner's cottage downwards, have long been washed out into a mere foot-track, deeply sunk between its banks, swooping down precipitously to the stream-level, and scarce two feet wide. So you emerge from the sand cliffs, and the valley is before you. Then the footpath winds along to the left (eastwards), having the cliff on one hand and the stream on the other, to a wider stretch, until with this for its best approach you come to a little hovel of three rooms and a lean-to shed, standing with its back walls close in against the sandy cliff.