TWO:Robert and Peter also did their share, feeding fowls, weeding vegetables. Robert was a stolid, well-behaved child, a trifle uninteresting, but hard-working and obedient. Pete was Reuben's delight��a wonderfully sturdy little fellow, who often amazed his father and Beatup by his precocious feats of strength. To amuse them he would sometimes shoulder Beatup's tools, or pick up a bag of chicken-meal with his teeth��he could even put his back against a young calf and prevent it entering a gate or reaching its stall. Reuben was careful not to let him strain himself, but he loved to handle his son's arms and shoulders, feeling the swell of the muscles under the skin. He even taught him the rudiments of boxing; he had had some practice himself as a boy in the Fair sparring booth, and though of late years he had been too busy to keep it up, he was a good teacher for little Pete, who could soon lick all his brothers and even deliver respectable punishment on Beatup's[Pg 122] nether limbs. Richard at the age of six was not of any great agricultural value, but at the village school he outshone the elder boys. Sometimes he gave Reuben anxious moments, for the smell of the midden now and then made him sick, which was scarcely a hopeful sign.Small wonder, then, that the birth of a son brought no joy. The child was born to an inheritance of shame, the heir of disaster. Reuben's head bowed nearly to his knees. He felt old and broken. He began to see that it was indeed dreadfully possible that he had thriven all these years, conquered waste lands, and enriched fat lands, only to be overthrown at last by a mere arbitrary piece of ill-luck. How the disease had broken out he could not tell��he had bought no foreign cattle, indeed recently he had bought no cattle at all. He could not blame himself in the smallest degree; it was just a malignant capricious thrust��as if fate had wanted to show him that what had taken him years of labour and battle and sacrifice to build up, could be destroyed in as many days.