ich their descendants could no more appreciate than an idyll of
Theocritus. Ah, but let it be remembered that they had also a _home_,
and this is the illumining word. If your peasant love the fields which
give him bread, he will not think it hard to labour in them; his toil
will no longer be as that of the beast, but upward-looking and touched
with a light from other than the visible heavens. No use to blink the
hard and dull features of rustic existence; let them rather be insisted
upon, that those who own and derive profit from the land may be constant
in human care for the lives which make it fruitful. Such care may
perchance avail, in some degree, to counteract the restless tendency of
the time; the dweller in a pleasant cottage is not so likely to wish to
wander from it as he who shelters himself in a hovel. Well-meaning folk
talk about reawakening love of the country by means of deliberate
instruction. Lies any hope that way? Does it seem to promise a return
of the time when the old English names of all our flowers were common on
rustic lips--by which, indeed, they were first uttered? The fact that
flowers and birds are well-nigh forgotten, together with the songs and
the elves, shows how advanced is the process of rural degeneration. Most
likely it is foolishness to hope for the revival of any bygone social
virtue. The husbandman of the future will be, I daresay, a well-paid
mechanic, of the engine-driver species; as he goes about his work he will
sing the last refrain of the music-hall, and his oft-recurring holidays
will be spent in the nearest great town. For him, I fancy, there will be
little attraction in ever such melodious talk about "common objects of
the country." Flowers, perhaps, at all events those of tilth and
pasture, will have been all but improved away. And, as likely as not,
the word Home will have only a special significance, indicating the
common abode of retired labourers who are drawing old-age pensions.

XVIII.

I cannot close my eyes upon this day without setting down some record of
it; yet the foolish insufficiency of words! At sunrise I looked forth;
nowhere could I discern a cloud the size of a man's hand; the leaves
quivered gently, as if with joy in the divine morning which glistened
upon their dew. At sunset I stood in the meadow above my house, and
watched the red orb sink into purple mist, whilst in the violet heaven
behind me rose the perfect moon. All between