Fifteen years ago I built my own wood cottage there, and now I'm rebuilding it of good Surrey stone." "Do you mean that you are building it yourself, with your own hands, no one to help you ?" I asked.
"Not so much as to carry a pail of water," he replied.

"I'm my own contractor, my own carpenter, and my own bricklayer, and I shall be sixty-seven come Michaelmas," he added, by no means irrelevantly.
There was pride in his voice,--pardonable pride, I thought, for who of us would not be proud to be able to build his own house from floor to chimney?
"Sixty-seven,--a man can see and do a good deal in that time," I said, not flattering myself on the originality of the remark, but desiring to set him talking.

In the country, as elsewhere, we must forego profundity if we wish to be understood.
"Yes, sir," he said, "I have been about a good deal in my time.

I have seen pretty well all of the world there is to see, and sailed as far as ship could take me." "Indeed, you have been a sailor too ?" "Twenty-two thousand miles of sea," he continued, without directly answering my remark.

"Yes, Vancouver's about as far as any vessel need want to go; and then I have caught seals off the coast of Labrador, and walked my way through the raspberry plains at the back of the White Mountains." "Vancouver," "Labrador," "The White Mountains," the very names, thus casually mentioned on a Surrey heath, seemed full of the sounding sea.
Like talismans they whisked one away to strange lands, across vast distances of space imagination refused to span.