Jocelyn Jernigham was a good name. The seventh Jocelyn thought so as he stood at his study window and looked down the vale of Pen Cuckoo toward that precise spot where the spire of Salisbury Cathedral could be seen through field-glasses on a clear day.
âHere I stand,â he said without turning his head, âand here my forebears have stood, generation after generation, and looked over their own tilth and tillage. Seven Jocelyn Jernighams.â
âIâm never quite sure,â said his son Henry Jocelyn, âwhat tilth and tillage are. What precisely, Father, is tilth?â
âThereâs no feeling for that sort of thing,â said Jocelyn, angrily, âamong the present generation. Cheap sneers and clever talk that mean nothing.â
âBut I assure you I like words to mean something. That is why I ask you to define a tilth. And you say, âthe present generation.â You mean my generation, donât you? But Iâm twenty-three. There is a newer generation than mine. If I marry Dinah ââ
âYou quibble deliberately in order to lead our conversation back to this absurd suggestion. If I had known ââ
Henry uttered an impatient noise and moved away from the fireplace. He joined his father in the window and he too looked down into the darkling vale of Pen Cuckoo. He saw an austere landscape, adamant beneath drifts of winter mist. The naked trees slept soundly, the fields were dumb with cold; the few stone cottages, with their comfortable signals of blue smoke, were the only waking things in all the valley.