--mowers drink enormous quantities of
liquor--and with the same view to prevent dispute each had his own
especial barrel. Families like this live fairly well, and have many
little comforts. Still, at the best, in winter it is a rough and
uncomfortable existence.

In the life of the English agricultural labourers there is absolutely no
poetry, no colour. Even their marriages--times when if ever in life
poetry will manifest itself--are sober, dull, tame, clumsy, and
colourless. I say sober in the sense of tint, for to get drunk appears
to be the one social pleasure of the marriage-day. They, of course, walk
to church; but then that walk usually leads across fields full of all
the beauties of the spring or the summer. There is nothing in the walk
itself to flatten down the occasion. But the procession is so dull--so
utterly ungenial--a stranger might pass it without guessing that a
wedding was toward. Except a few rude jests; except that there is an
attempt to walk arm-in-arm (it is only an attempt, for they forget to
allow for each other's motions); except the Sunday dresses, utterly
devoid of taste, what is there to distinguish this day from the rest?
There is the drunken carousal, it is true, all the afternoon and
evening. There are no fete days in the foreign sense in the English
labourer's life. There are the fairs and feasts, and a fair is the most
melancholy of sights. Showmen's vans, with pictures outside of unknown
monsters; merry-go-rounds, nut stalls, gingerbread stalls, cheap Jacks,
and latterly photographic "studios"; behind all these the alehouse; the
beating of drums and the squalling of pigs, the blowing of horns, and
the neighing of horses trotted out for show, the roar of a rude
crowd--these constitute a country fair. There is no colour--nothing
flowery or poetical about this festival of the labourer.

The village feasts are still less interesting. Here and there the
clergyman of the parish has succeeded in turning what was a rude
saturnalia into a decorous "fete," with tea in a tent. But generally the
feasts are falling into rapid disuse, and would perhaps have died away
altogether had not the benefit societies often chosen that day for their
annual club-dinner. A village feast consists of two or three gipsies
located on the greensward by the side of the road, and displaying
ginger-beer, nuts, and toys for sale; an Aunt Sally; and, if the village
is a large one, the day may be honoured by the presence o