hopes too, are bent on the further work they mean to
do when they shall have had their tea. For the more old-fashioned men
allow themselves but little rest, and in many a cottage garden of an
evening you may see the father of the family soberly at work, and liking
it too. If his wife is able to come and look on and chatter to him, or
if he can hear her laughing with a friend in the next garden, so much
the better; but he does not stop work. Impelled, as I shall show later,
by other reasons besides those of economy, many of the men make
prodigiously long days of it, at least during the summer months. I have
known them to leave home at five or even four in the morning, walk five
or six miles, do a day's work, walk back in the evening so as to reach
home at six or seven o'clock, and then, after a meal, go on again in
their gardens until eight or nine. They seem to be under some spiritual
need to keep going; their conscience enslaves them. So they grow thin
and gaunt in body, grave and very quiet in their spirits. But sullen
they very rarely are. With rheumatism and "the 'ump" combined a man will
sometimes grow exasperated and be heard to speak irritably, but usually
it is a very amiable "Good-evening" that greets you from across the
hedge where one of these men is silently digging or hoeing.

The nature of their work, shall I say, tends to bring them to quietness
of soul? I hesitate to say it, because, though work upon the ground with
spade or hoe has such a soothing influence upon the amateur, there is a
difference between doing it for pleasure during a spare hour and doing
it as a duty after a twelve hours' day, and without any prospect of
holiday as long as one lives. Nevertheless it is plain to be seen that,
albeit their long days too often reduce them to a state of apathy, these
quiet and patient men experience no less often a compensating delight in
the friendly feeling of the tool responding to their skill, and in the
fine freshness of the soil as they work it, and in the solace, so varied
and so unfailingly fresh, of the open air. Thus much at least I have
seen in their looks, and have heard in their speech. On a certain June
evening when it had set in wet, five large-limbed men, just off their
work on the railway, came striding past me up the hill. They had sacks
over their shoulders; their clothes and boots, from working in gravel
all day, were of the same yellowish-brown colour as the sacks; they were
getting dec