easily and as naturally as if there had never been any solution of continuity-making due allowance for the inevitable something which handicaps any one who comes as a stranger into a parish when he is in the fifties, as compared with him who comes when he is in the twenties. It is pretty much the sort of difference that one is conscious of at times in the saddle; I can ride just as well as I could thirty years ago, but I can't fall as well as I could in the old days.

Having said thus much by way of preamble, I proceed to offer the reader my impressions of what strike me as the most notable changes in country life which have come about during my absence from Arcadia.

The change in the face of the country generally is so patent as to require only a few words. The small fields that used to be so picturesque and so wasteful-where one could botanise with so much interest and pick up all sorts of odd pieces of information-have gone or are rapidly going; the tall hedges, the high banks, the scrub or the bottoms where a fox or a weasel might hope to find a night's lodging, the bye-lanes where the gipsies' tents used to pitch, where one could learn Romaney words, and, if we were very liberal and very wary, even listen to a Romaney's song and the scraping of his fiddle -all these things have vanished-' been done away with, sir!'-and nobody can tell you by what authority these reforms have been brought about the rustics don't like to talk about it. But the broad tilths are clean as gardens, and the face of the land looks up at you with a shiney, luxurious self-complacency, suggesting sometimes rather a smirk than a smile.

All this has been brought about by a huge expenditure of capital, such as the farmers, whom I knew in my earlier Arcadian days, certainly had not at their command. The money has been brought in by men who were not simple sons of the soil-retired publicans and commercial travellers, town shopkeepers and those intelligent and pushing gentlemen yclept salesmen ; or young men whose fathers have left them a few thousands and a defective education, with no particular vocation for anything and no opening anywhere, men of no vices, no culture, and no tastes, but perfectly respectable, often sometimes more, and with a desire to settle and do something, and live a simple life with outdoor pursuits in the pure country air.

The rural districts have benefited largely by this outpouring of money, but they have lost something too. The shopkeepers in the market-towns have been enormous gainers and have grown rich, their enterprise has met with its reward; the country lawyers have increased and multiplied and thriven exceedingly; the bankers have had a good time of it; the landlords' rents have risen largely; the labourer's wages have gone up, and his luxuries have multiplied surprisingly. But the small farmers have grown fewer and fewer, their homesteads have fallen into decay or been pulled down, they

and their families have been thrust out-driven off to America or New Zealand or Australia, and their place knows them no more; the village shopkeepers have almost been improved off the face of the earth, and last, not least, the country clergy are relatively to their neighbours much poorer than they were, and are in process of becoming seriously impoverished.

Let us deal first with those who have suffered loss by the revolution that has gone on.

I leave to those who are our accepted teachers in the science of political economy the question of the comparative cheapness of large and small farms. I am even ready to concede something. Small farms do mean expensive buildings to keep up, do mean that the occupier is for the most part a needy struggling man, do mean that he often lacks sufficient capital to cultivate his land to the best advantage. But they mean something else too. They mean that in those unpretending homesteads, where there are always some repairs needed which the landlord shakes his head at, there are to be found habitual thrift, sobriety, and self-denial; they mean boys and girls brought up in a rigorous school of toil; they mean few accomplishments, no drawing-rooms, small book learning, and 'good old idees of what's right and what ain't;' they mean that under those thatched roofs whose eaves have offered the swallows summer refuge for a century or more, two or three generations of frugal peasants have brought up their families and yet paid their way, and could do it now if you wrung from them only as much rent as their fathers paid in the best times, or asked only as many shillings an acre as the big man on the other side of the hedge pays for his far larger holding. These people are the only people left among us who are witnesses for the rugged virtue growing, alas ! so rare, the only people who are not so hasty to get rich that they cannot afford to be honest, the only people who do not scorn manual labour as degrading, and who do not pretend to think one man or one place as good as another, who-poor simpletons!' -still passionately love the land of their fathers

With love far brought

From out the storied past and used within the present;

and who, when compelled to make room for some go-ahead capitalist at last, turn their backs upon the old place with many a sigh, and not seldom a sob, puzzled, ashamed, and bitter at heart, with a sense of wrong, and possessed by the conviction that the devil and man have been against them or they would never have been turned out of the old home.'

Happily, however, the small farmers have not all been got rid of: they always have had a hard time of it, but, strange to say, they are not the people who have suffered most from the bad harvests of the past few years. The 'gentleman farmer,' whose pride was to carry

on agriculture on the grand scale, finds that he has burnt his fingersand if he has done only that he is fortunate the small occupant holds on. The explanation is to be sought in the fact that the one must needs be to a great extent in the power of his subordinate; the other finds his shepherd, cowkeeper, and yardman in his own household, and so keeps his labour bill at the lowest possible figure, while at the same time the quality of the labour supplied is the best that can be secured. The small man, too, is by nature and long habit cautious, thrifty, and slow to launch out into expense when things are going well; he has a horror of being behindhand at the bankers'; indeed he has some reluctance to have dealings with a bank at all, his credit does not stand so high that he is ever tempted to trade far beyond his capital. He is never too proud to make a profit out of anything, however trifling. What does the big man care for cocks and hens? He will tell you they are more trouble than they are worth. He eats the eggs for breakfast and the chickens for dinner, goes in for fancy breeds and runs up an ornamental walk' for them, he likes to look at them or to see his name among the competitors at the next poultry show. He keeps a gardener too, and exhibits his roses against the country. Sell my vegetables?' said one of them to me with some warmth. I'm not brought to that yet. Do you take me

for a nurseryman?'

I am far from insinuating that these gentlemen have not a right to do all this, for why should an agriculturist who has embarked ten thousand pounds in the stocking of his farm not have his amusements as well as the tradesman with far less to fall back upon? But this I do say, that the land never could support-never will support— two gentlemanly households. If the landlord is to live in luxury out of the rent, the tenant must not expect to do so too: one or the other must come down. Meanwhile the occupier of 60 or 100 acres lives by his hen-house, his ducks, and his pigstye; his garden is not often an ornamental parterre, but at any rate it brings in a trifle. He eats no eggs-it would be eating money. He shambles to the next brewery with any beast of burden that can jiggle along and fetches his load of grains, which he tells you solemnly have reached an unconscionable price now-even sixpence a bushel. His wife or daughter takes her basket of butter to the next market, or gets rid of the apples or the cabbages, or turns an honest penny by the flowers. The big man tells you that geese and turkeys don't pay. Of course they don't, if for weeks you have to pay a lad a shilling a day to look after the one, and the others have to take their chance against the rats. But little Jem puts his little soul into it when he is bidden to keep an eye on mother's 'guslings,' and it is as good as a play to him to fetch home the truant turkeys when they have marched off to forbidden lands, or to find out where that speckled hen has got her nest-she who will do things on the sly.

'How do you manage to pay all your outgoings in these bad times?' I said to one good woman whose husband farms some fifty acres at a ruinous rent. 'Why, you see, sir, the corn about pays the landlord and sich, and then we reckon to live, and there's seven of us, and we all help. I don't know how we do, but we keep going!'

I should think that the landlord and sich' would absorb all that this good man could make out of his stackyard in the best years, and yet he gets along,' and is so muddle-headed, poor creature! as to be possessed by the notion that seven mouths to fill implies seven pairs of hands to toil, and has been so deplorably educated that he cannot get rid of the old-world prejudice that children and the fruit of the womb are an heritage and gift that cometh of the Lord.' And so those luxuries which the big man consumes and tells you he takes no account of, the small man lives by. They constitute his margin of profit; and whereas half a dozen bad years take all the large occupier's corn to pay the landlord and sich,' and, bringing him in face of a deficiency, force him back upon his capital or his banker to enable him to keep up the pace which he knows not how to slacken -for are we not all children of habit?-the smaller man is only a little worse off than he was before. They must be sorry harvests indeed when he cannot make up for bad corn crops by getting some 'turn of luck,' as he calls it, from his poultry, his vegetables, or his dairy. I bless the Lord for one thing as I heard you say, Doctor, though it warn't in no sermon!' said one of them to me the other day. What was that?' I asked. Why! didn't you tell me last winter as the coppers ain't all tails?'

And yet these are the men whom economists and agents and capitalists are combining to oust from their holdings. Nevertheless they are the very salt of the earth, and among them are to be found not only the best but almost the only remaining specimens of the slow, silent, stolid, sturdy English yeoman whom you may knock about all day and all night, but who will never suspect that he is getting beaten till you squeeze the life out of him by lifting him from his mother earth, and who never will confess that he can be beaten as long as you fight fair'! To worry such a class as this from their ramshackle little houses, where their fathers planted the apple-trees and their mothers the honeysuckle that sprawls about the porch, is to my mind to commit a crime which, in addition to all the rest of my sins, I should be sorry to have to answer for at the bar of God.

Another class who have been losers by the changes that have been in operation is the class of village tradesmen. I am afraid they will find it hard to enlist any pity, and yet they deserve some; their disappearance is surely to be regretted, and they are disappearing rapidly. The increased facilities of locomotion must be credited

with much of the loss of custom which has driven these men outmuch, but not all. The abolition of the turnpikes has been to the village shopkeepers a far more serious blow than the world generally supposes. The grocer from the town sends round his cart day by day and pays no vexatious sixpence. The pushing draper establishes an agency' at convenient distances, and contributes nothing to the highways which he uses so largely. He grumbles loudly at the borough rates, but he grumbles more loudly if the roads are 'rotten." If a rolling stone trips up the high-stepping mare that tools him along through the village street, the local newspaper soon hears of it, and the public are assured that the country cannot stand the negligence of the surveyors. Meanwhile it is the village huckster who has to pay his heavy quota towards the rate, and, if the townsman who competes with him saves 10l. a year in sixpences, somebody has had the burden shifted on to his shoulders.

I remember the time when among the most enterprising and intelligent of the peasantry there were always two careers open: the one was the hiring of a bit of land' large enough to keep a horse and a cow or two; the other was the setting up a shop where even in old age an honest frugal couple might make a livelihood and never be forced to go on the parish.

I seldom hear of any one looking forward to the former of these possible careers. I never find any one inclined to venture upon the latter.

There is yet another class who have been no gainers by the great dissemination of money throughout the rural districts. The country parson is a much poorer man than he was. Not that his mere household expenses, the cost of mere food and raiment, have necessarily increased (except so far as the dying out of frugality and simplicity has to answer for the multiplication of his wants), for though butcher's meat and labour are enhanced in price, almost everything else is cheaper than in my early Arcadian days-but the parson's expenses now are outside his house, not in it, and if he have half a dozen children then his troubles begin. There are no more free passes for boys and girls, no nominations to this or that well-endowed school, no close exhibitions at the Universities, no patronage to this or that post. Open competition' has thrown all the good things into the laps of the wealthy. What chance has an average boy bred up in a country parsonage against another who from childhood has had all the advantages of the very best and most careful training that is to be found upon the face of the earth? Poor country clergymen are none the better for being poor,' they are rudely told: the country does not want to help the needy, but the meritorious.' It is as if admission to the pool of Bethesda could only be obtained by a doctor's certificate that the sturdy patient was not afflicted with any disease.