Mad Barbara by Warwick Deeping

Chris Jennifer was too busy a man to worry his slow brain greatly over other people's affairs, for when a man farms for the children who shall come after him he can give all the daylight to the land, and trudge home to feed and sleep without much communion with the philosophers and poets. There is always work upon a farm, save for those who have sore heels and a chronic thorn in the forefinger. For these autumn and winter months ploughing, hedging, ditching, carting fagots and stacking them for the winter, spreading the muck abroad, taking odd carpentering jobs in hand, to say nothing of the feeding and tending of sheep and cattle, the fattening of pigs and bullocks for Christmas, the trapping of vermin, and the netting of the accursed cony. Chris Jennifer's most luminous moment was after a rat-hunt about the barns and out-houses. To take by the tail the carcasses of sundry strapping rats and heap them in a funeral pile was an act that made Mr. Jennifer feel that Satan can be confounded in this world and his imps punished for stealing a farmer's com. For if Chris Jennifer hated anything it was a rat, and next to the rat he hated couch-grass, while the purple-polled thistle came in a bad third.

When Mrs. Winnie's husband went to bed he slept the deep, sonorous sleep of a round-headed peasant whose lungs had been breathing in clean air all the day. And not even the facts that John Gore had borrowed his best rope and that his wife was dabbling her hands in affairs that did not concern her could keep Master Christopher awake and talking. All he had deigned to hope was that "us be not goin' agen the law," and that "this fine gentleman ben't feedin' on hot pie-crust. " Then he drew his nightcap down, turned on his right side, and went to sleep with the ease of a dog.