ly against the sea? or
strip the peat of Solway, or plant Plinlimmon moors with larch--then, in
due season, some amateur reaping and threshing?

"Nay, we reap and thresh by steam, in these advanced days."

I know it, my wise and economical friends. The stout arms God gave you
to win your bread by, you would fain shoot your neighbours, and God's
sweet singers with;[87] then you invoke the fiends to your farm-service;
and--

When young and old come forth to play
On a sulphurous holiday,
Tell how the darkling goblin sweat
(His feast of cinders duly set),
And, belching night, where breathed the morn,
His shadowy flail hath threshed the corn
That ten day-labourers could not end.

150. Going back to the matter in hand, we will press the example closer.
On a green knoll above that plain of the Arve, between Cluse and
Bonneville, there was, in the year 1860, a cottage, inhabited by a
well-doing family--man and wife, three children, and the grandmother. I
call it a cottage, but in truth, it was a large chimney on the ground,
wide at the bottom, so that the family might live round the fire;
lighted by one small broken window, and entered by an unclosing door.
The family, I say, was "well-doing;" at least it was hopeful and
cheerful; the wife healthy, the children, for Savoyards, pretty and
active, but the husband threatened with decline, from exposure under the
cliffs of the Mont Vergi by day, and to draughts between every plank of
his chimney in the frosty nights.

"Why could he not plaster the chinks?" asks the practical reader. For
the same reason that your child cannot wash its face and hands till you
have washed them many a day for it, and will not wash them when it can,
till you force it.

151. I passed this cottage often in my walks, had its window and door
mended; sometimes mended also a little the meal of sour bread and broth,
and generally got kind greeting and smile from the face of young or old;
which greeting this year, narrowed itself into the half-recognizing
stare of the elder child, and the old woman's tears; for the father and
mother were both dead,--one of sickness, the other of sorrow. It
happened that I passed not alone, but with a companion, a practised
English joiner, who, while these people were dying of cold, had been
employed from six in the morning to six in the evening, for two months,
in fitting, without nails, the panels of a single door in a large house
in