The fox cubs played in the gorse in the early morning, she told him.

And if you looked out at dawn you could always see two badgers.

Sometimes they knocked each other over like two boys fighting, she said.
"You won't go far this afternoon, Jacob," said his mother, popping her head in at the door, "for the Captain's coming to say good-bye." It was the last day of the Easter holidays.
Wednesday was Captain Barfoot's day.

He dressed himself very neatly in blue serge, took his rubber-shod stick--for he was lame and wanted two fingers on the left hand, having served his country--and set out from the house with the flagstaff precisely at four o'clock in the afternoon.
At three Mr.Dickens, the bath-chair man, had called for Mrs.Barfoot.
"Move me," she would say to Mr.Dickens, after sitting on the esplanade for fifteen minutes.

And again, "That'll do, thank you, Mr.Dickens." At the first command he would seek the sun; at the second he would stay the chair there in the bright strip.
An old inhabitant himself, he had much in common with Mrs.
Barfoot--James Coppard's daughter.