ney, settling once
a month. Their life was hard indeed. But the great prosperity which
had come upon the farmers did them no good. In too many cases it
melted away in drink. The habit of drinking became settled in a
family. Bad habits endured after the prosperity had departed; and in
some cases those who had once owned their farms as well as occupied
them had to quit the homes of their forefathers. Here and there one,
however, laid the foundation of a fortune, as fortunes are understood
in the country; and shrewd old Jonathan was one of these.

Even down to very recent days a spell of drinking--simple drinking--was
the staple amusement of many an otherwise respectable farmer. Not many
years since it was not unusual for some well-to-do farmer of the old
school to ride off on his nag, and not be heard of for a week, till he
was discovered at a distant roadside inn, where he had spent the
interval in straightforward drinking. These habits are now happily
extinct. It was in those old times that wheat was bought and hoarded
with the express object of raising the price to famine pitch: a thing
then sometimes practicable, though not always successful. Thus in 1801
the price of wheat in March was 55_l._ per load, while in October it
had fallen to 15_l._ Men forgot the misery of the poor in their
eagerness for guineas.

Hilary, with all his old prejudices, was not so foolish as to desire a
return of times like that. He had undergone privation himself in
youth, for farmers' sons were but a little better off than plough-lads
even in his early days; and he did not wish to make money by another
man's suffering. Still he was always grieving about the wheat crop,
and how it had fallen in estimation. It was a sight to see the gusto
with which he would run his hand into a sack of wheat to sample it.
'Here, feel this,' he would say to me, 'you can slip your hand in up
to your elbow; and now hold up your palm--see, the grains are as plump
as cherry-stones.'

After hearing Hilary talk so much of old Jonathan I thought I should
like to see the place where he had lived, and later in the season
walked up on the hills for that purpose. The stunted fir-trees on the
Down gave so little shadow that I was glad to find a hawthorn under
whose branches I could rest on the sward. The prevalent winds of
winter sweeping without check along the open slope had bent the
hawthorn before them, and the heat of the sultry summer day appeared
the greater on