jug of beer to drink. He does not know French,
he has never heard of Metternich, but he puts the famous maxim in
practice, and, satisfied with to-day, says in his heart, _Apres nous le
Deluge_. No one disturbs him; his landlord has a certain respect and
pity for him--respect, perhaps, for an old family that has tilled his
land for a century, but which he now sees is slowly but irretrievably
passing away. So the decayed farmer dozes out his existence.

Meantime his sons are coming on, and it too often happens that the brief
period of sunshine and prosperity has done its evil work with them too.
They have imbibed ideas of gentility and desire for excitement utterly
foreign to the quiet, peaceful life of an agriculturist. They have
gambled on the turf and become involved. Notwithstanding the fall of
their father from his good position, they still retain the belief that
in the end they shall find enough money to put all to rights; but when
the end comes there is a deficiency. Among them there is perhaps one
more plodding than the rest. He takes the farm, and keeps a house for
the younger children. In ten years he becomes a bankrupt, and the family
are scattered abroad upon the face of the earth. The plodding one
becomes a bailiff, and lives respectably all his life; but his sons are
never educated, and he saves no money; there is nothing for them but to
go out to work as farm labourers.

Such is something like the usual way in which the decline and fall of a
farming family takes place, though it may of course arise from
unforeseen circumstances, quite out of the control of the agriculturist.
In any case the children graduate downwards till they become labourers.
Nowadays many of them emigrate, but in the long time that has gone
before, when emigration was not so easy, many hundreds of families have
thus become reduced to the level of the labourers they once employed. So
it is that many of the labourers of to-day bear names which less than
two generations ago were well known and highly respected over a wide
tract of country. It is natural for them to look back with a certain
degree of pleasure upon that past, and some may even have been incited
to attempt a return to the old position.

But the great majority, the mass, of the agricultural labourers have
been labourers time out of mind. Their fathers were labourers, their
grandfathers and their great-grandfathers have all worked upon the
farms, and very often almost contin