CHAPTER IX
About ten o'clock on the night of the ball at Beechmark, a labourer was
crossing the park on his way home from his allotment. Thanks to
summertime and shortened hours of labour he had been able to get his
winter greens in, and to earth up his potatoes, all in two strenuous
evenings; and he was sauntering home dead-tired. But he had doubled his
wages since the outbreak of war and his fighting son had come back to him
safe, so that on the whole he was inclined to think that the old country
was worth living in! The park he was traversing was mostly open pasture
studded with trees, except where at the beginning of the eighteenth
century the Lord Buntingford of the day had planted a wood of oak and
beech about the small lake which he had made by the diversion of two
streamlets that had once found a sluggish course through the grassland.
The trees in it were among the finest in the country, but like so much of
English woodland before the war, they had been badly neglected for many
years. The trees blown down by winter storms had lain year after year
where they fell; the dead undergrowth was choking the young saplings; and
some of the paths through the wood had practically disappeared.
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