‘I aim to read books,’ Dick said. ‘There’s more than a million books in the world and I’ve not read e’er one yet. I aim to know everything. I aim to read a heap of books. It’s in books is found the wisdom of the world, they say.’

‘You!’ Hen said. ‘What books?’

‘More than a million, maybe two million. I lay off to read all the books on the earth, or nohow all the good ones. But I ain’t read e’er a one yet.’

A man, Luke Wimble, came into the country to sell fruit trees to the farmers, the trees to be delivered to the farms and set in the ground in late autumn. He came to the tenant house on the hill many times, always eager to talk, always sitting down in the house or in the doorway.

Then he asked Ellen and Jasper to board him, saying that he would be glad to sleep in the loft with the boys. All day he went up and down the roads and lanes, selling fruit trees and vines and shrubs to the farm owners, but at supper time he was back at Ellen’s table where he liked to talk with any who gave him replies. His face bore a perpetual smile embedded in the way of its muscles, and everyone liked him. He said that he was twenty-eight years old. He would lean near her to hear what little Melissy whispered, his round boyish face in a faint smile of anxiety and concern, and then, having replied to her, he would beam a great smile upon the whole table and pass his hand over his hair in delight. He would tell of the wonders of plants and trees and he never knew or noticed if the boys teased.

‘And onions, they belong to the lily family, would you suppose it? And garlic,’ he said. ‘But apples now, they belong to the rose.’

‘Pass the lilies, please,’ Hen said, speaking very softly, ‘please pass the lilies o’ the valley.’

‘I’m plumb a fool about my lilies,’ Joe said. ‘But they do strong me, seem like. They strong my breath.’

‘When Hen lays off to kiss Cordie Peters, that day he don’t eat his lilies,’ Joe said again. ‘You just watch Hen.’

‘I eat whatsoever I want to,’ Hen said, ‘and if Cordie she don’t like it she can lump it.’

‘But the best peaches are the Mayflower, and that’s a white cling, white meat and a good pie peach or eater,’ Luke said. ‘And there’s the Carmen, white in the meat and part cling and part free, or if you want a yellow meat, why there’s the Elberta or maybe there’s the JH Hale, both yellow meat and free stone, or the Crawford Late and that’s a prime peach for sure.’

Or he would lean aside to catch little Melissy’s whisper and to help her plate, or she would ask for another noggin of milk, beaming over his words. He ate his food heartily, never knowing one kind from another nor caring which he ate, for all were happily taken.