ort, the place
is home, and he sits under his own vine and fig-tree. It is not to his
advantage to leave this and go miles away. It is different with the
mechanic who lives in a back court devoid of sunshine, hardly visited by
the fresh breeze, without a tree, without a yard of earth to which to
become attached. The factory closes, the bell is silent, the hands are
discharged; provided he can get fresh employment it matters little. He
leaves the back court without regret, and enters another in a distant
town. But an agricultural labourer who has planted his own place feels an
affection for it. The young men wander and are restless; the middle-aged
men who have once anchored do not like to quit. They have got the four
points of their own genuine charter; those who would infuse further vague
hopes are not doing them any other service than to divert them from the
substance to the shadow.

Past those two new cottages which have been mentioned there runs a road
which is a main thoroughfare. Along this road during the year this change
was worked there walked a mournful procession--men and women on tramp.
Some of these were doubtless rogues and vagabonds by nature and choice;
but many, very many, were poor fellows who had really lost employment, and
were gradually becoming degraded to the company of the professional
beggar. The closing of collieries, mines, workshops, iron furnaces, &c.,
had thrown hundreds on the mercy of chance charity, and compelled them to
wander to and fro. How men like these on tramp must have envied the
comfortable cottages, the well-stocked gardens, the pigsties, the
beehives, and the roses of the labourers!

If the labourer has never gone up on the floodtide of prosperity to the
champagne wages of the miner, neither has he descended to the woe which
fell on South Wales when children searched the dust-heaps for food, nor to
that suffering which forces those whose instinct is independence to the
soup-kitchen. He has had, and still has, steady employment at a rate of
wages sufficient, as is shown by the appearance of his cottage itself, to
maintain him in comparative comfort. The furnace may be blown out, and
strong men may ask themselves, What shall we do next? But still the plough
turns up the earth morning after morning. The colliery may close, but
still the corn ripens, and extra wages are paid to the harvest men.

This continuous employment without even a fear of cessation is an
advantage, the val