At the same time, it must be allowed that his own evidence was not quite to be trusted. A man in his position, with the workhouse waiting for him, will not make the most of his years to an employer, and I sometimes fancied that Bettesworth wished me to think him younger than he was. But it is quite possible that he was not himself certain of his own age. I have it from his sister-in-law that both his parents died while he was still a child, and that he, with his brothers and sisters, was taken, destitute, to the workhouse. Thence, I suppose, he was rescued by that uncle, who kept a travelling van; and the man who carried the boy to fairs and racecourses, and thrashed him so savagely that at last he ran away to become Farmer Barnes's plough-boy, was not a person likely to instruct him very carefully about his age.
The point, however, is of no real importance. A labourer who has at least the look of being old: thin, grey-eyed, quiet, with bent shoulders and patient though determined expression of face--such is the Bettesworth whose last years are recorded in these chapters; and it does not much matter that we should know exactly how many years it took to reduce him to this state.
_December 7, 1892._--The ground in the upper part of the garden being too hard frozen for Bettesworth to continue this morning the work he was doing there yesterday, I found him some digging to do in a more sheltered corner, where the fork would enter the soil. With snow threatening to come and stop all outdoor work, it was not well that he should stand idle too soon.
"Oh dear!" he said one day, "we don't want no snow! We had enough o' that two winters ago. That was a fair scorcher, that was.--There! I couldn't tell anybody how we _did_ git through. Still, we _got_ through, somehow. But there was some about here as was purty near starved. That poor woman as died over here t'other day...."
Here he broke off, to tell of a labourer's wife who had died in giving birth to twins, one of whom was also dead. Including the other twin, there were seven children living. Bettesworth talked of the husband, too; but presently working round again to the bad winter of 1889-1890, he proceeded:
"I _knows_ they" (this woman and her family) "was purty near starvin'. _I_ give her two or three half-bushels o' taters. I can't bear to see 'em like that, 'specially if there's little childern about. I give away bushels o' taters that winter, 'cause them as _had_ got any had got 'em buried away--couldn't git at 'em (in the frozen ground). Mine was stowed away where I could git 'em."