After making much of Annie, who had a wondrous liking for him--and he said he was her godfather, but God knows how he could have been, unless they confirmed him precociously--away he went, and young Winnie's sides shone like a cherry by candlelight.
Now I feel that of those boyish days I have little more to tell, because everything went quietly, as the world for the most part does with us.

I began to work at the farm in earnest, and tried to help my mother, and when I remembered Lorna Doone, it seemed no more than the thought of a dream, which I could hardly call to mind.

Now who cares to know how many bushels of wheat we grew to the acre, or how the cattle milched till we ate them, or what the turn of the seasons was?
But my stupid self seemed like to be the biggest of all the cattle; for having much to look after the sheep, and being always in kind appetite, I grew four inches longer in every year of my farming, and a matter of two inches wider; until there was no man of my size to be seen elsewhere upon Exmoor.

Let that pass: what odds to any how tall or wide I be?
There is no Doone's door at Plover's Barrows and if there were I could never go through it.

They vexed me so much about my size, long before I had completed it, girding at me with paltry jokes whose wit was good only to stay at home, that I grew shame-faced about the matter, and feared to encounter a looking-glass.