The toil of twenty years had broken
the old man's body, but his spirit was undaunted as ever. There was
a gleam of triumph in his eye as he shook his fist at the "line"
post on the causeway. "We beat them," he said; "we did."
They did. I had heard it told many times how this brave little
people, driven out of the German market, had conquered the English
and held it against the world, three times in one man's lifetime
making a new front to changed industrial conditions; turning from
grain-raising to cattle on the hoof, again to slaughtered meat,
and once more to dairy-farming, and holding always their own. How,
robbed of one-third of their country by a faithless foe, they had
set about with indomitable energy to reclaim the arid moor, and
in one generation laid under the plough or planted as woodland as
great an area as that which had been stolen from them. Ay, it was
a brave record, a story to make one proud of being of such a people.
I, too, heard the pewit's plaint in my childhood and caught the
sun-fish in the brook. I was a boy when they planted the black
post at the line and watered it with the blood of my countrymen.
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