days when corn
was at famine prices. But these careful economies, this continual
saving, put more money in his purse than all that sudden flush of
prosperity. Every groat thus saved was as a nail driven into an oak,
fixed and stable, becoming firmer as time went on. How strangely
different the farmers of to-day, with a score of machines and
appliances, with expensive feeding-stuffs, with well-furnished villas!
Each one of Jonathan's beans in his quart mug, each one of the acorns
in his pocket became a guinea.

Jonathan's hat was made to measure on his own special block by the
hatter in Overboro' town, and it was so hard and stout that he could
sit upon it without injury. His top-boots always hung near the
fireplace, that they might not get mouldy; and he rode into market
upon his 'short-tail horse,' as he called his crop-tail nag. A farmer
was nothing thought of unless he wore top-boots, which seemed a
distinguishing mark, as it were, of the equestrian order of
agriculture.

But his shoes were made straight; not as now one to each foot--a right
and left--but each exactly alike; and he changed his shoes every
morning, wearing one on one foot one day and on the other the next,
that they might not get worn to either foot in particular. Shoes
lasted a great length of time in those days, the leather being all
tanned with oak bark only, and thoroughly seasoned before it was cut
up. There is even a story of a farmer who wore his best shoes every
Sunday for seven years in Sundays--fifty years--and when he died had
them buried with him, still far from worn out.

A traveller once returned from America--in those days a very far-off
land--and was recounting the wonders he had seen, and among them how
the folk there used sleighs, not only for driving in but for the
removal of heavy goods. But Jonathan did not think it strange, since
when he was young wheeled vehicles were not so common. He had himself
seen loads of hay drawn home on 'sleds' from English meadows, and
could tell where a 'sled' had last been used. There were aged men
living about the hamlet in his day--if that could be called a hamlet
in which there were barely a score of people, all told--who could
recollect when the first waggon came to The Idovers. At all events,
they pointed out a large field, called the Conigers, where it was
taken to turn it round; for it was constructed in so primitive a style
that the forewheels would not pass under the body, and thus requ