The farms were very small, mostly held by men who did all the work
themselves with the help of their families.
Such a farm belonged to John Kenton of Elmwood. It lay at the head
of a long green lane, where the bushes overhead almost touched one
another in the summer, and the mud and mire were very deep in winter;
but that mattered the less as nothing on wheels went up or down it
but the hay or harvest carts, creaking under their load, and drawn by
the old mare, with a cow to help her.
Beyond lay a few small fields, and then a bit of open ground
scattered with gorse and thorn bushes, and much broken by ups and
downs. There, one afternoon on a big stone was seated Steadfast
Kenton, a boy of fourteen, sturdy, perhaps loutish, with an honest
ruddy face under his leathern cap, a coarse smock frock and stout
gaiters. He was watching the fifteen sheep and lambs, the old goose
and gander and their nine children, the three cows, eight pigs, and
the old donkey which got their living there.
From the top of the hill, beyond the cleft of the river Avon, he
could see the smoke and the church towers of the town of Bristol, and
beyond it, the slime of the water of the Bristol Channel; and nearer,
on one side, the spire of Elmwood Church looked up, and, on the
other, the woods round Elmwood House, and these ran out as it were,
lengthening and narrowing into a wooded cleft or gulley, Hermit's
Gulley, which broke the side of the hill just below where Steadfast
stood, and had a little clear stream running along the bottom.
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