a few minutes after four o’clock
He was all bent by years and hard work , with muscles of iron , hands gnarled and lumpy , but clinching like a vise ; grey head thrust forward on shoulders which had carried forkfuls of hay and grain , and leaned to the cradle and the scythe , and been heaped with cordwood till they were like hide and metal ; white straggling beard and red watery eyes , which , to me , were always hung with an intangible veil of mystery -- though that , maybe , was my boyish fancy . Added to all this he was so very deaf that you had to speak clear and loud into his ear ; and many people he could not hear at all , if their words were not sharp-cut , no matter how loud . A silent , withdrawn man he was , living close to Mother Earth , twin-brother of Labour , to whom Morning and Daytime were sounding-boards for his axe , scythe , saw , flail , and milking-pail , and Night a round hollow of darkness into which he crept , shutting the doors called Silence behind him , till the impish page of Toil came tapping again , and he stepped awkwardly into the working world once more . Winter and summer saw him putting the kettle on the fire a few minutes after four o'clock , in winter issuing with lantern from the kitchen door to the stable and barn to feed the stock ; in summer sniffing the grey dawn and looking out on his fields of rye and barley , before he went to gather the cows for milking and take the horses to water . For forty years he and his worn-faced wife bowed themselves beneath the yoke , first to pay for the hundred-acre farm , and then to bring up and educate their seven children . Something noble in them gave them ambitions for their boys and girls which they had never had for themselves ; but when had gone the forty years , in which the little farm had twice been mortgaged to put the eldest son through college as a doctor , they faced the bitter fact that the farm had passed from them to Rodney , the second son , who had come at last to keep a hotel in a town fifty miles away . Generous-hearted people would think that these grown-up sons and daughters should have returned the old people 's long toil and care by buying up the farm and handing it back to them , their rightful refuge in the decline of life .