r belief in the ancestral notions of good
and evil. In other words, they had a civilization to support them--a
poor thing, perhaps, a poor kind of civilization, but their own, and
entirely within the reach of them all. I have no hesitation in affirming
all this; because, though I never saw the system in its completeness, I
came here soon enough to find a few old people still partially living by
it. These old people, fortunate in the possession of their own cottages
and a little land, were keepers of pigs and donkeys, and even a few
cows. They kept bees, too; they made wine; they often paid in kind for
any services that neighbours did for them; and with the food they could
grow, and the firing they could still obtain from the woods and heath,
their living was half provided for. The one of them I knew best was not
the most typical. Shrewd old man that he was, he had adapted himself so
far as suited him to a more commercial economy, and had grown suspicious
and avaricious; yet if he could have been translated suddenly back into
the eighteenth century, he would scarce have needed to change any of his
habits, or even his clothes. He wore an old-fashioned "smock frock,"
doubtless home-made; and in this he pottered about all day--pottered, at
least, in his old age, when I knew him--not very spruce as to personal
cleanliness, smelling of his cow-stall, saving money, wanting no
holiday, independent of books and newspapers, indifferent to anything
that happened farther off than the neighbouring town, liking his pipe
and glass of beer, and never knowing what it was to feel dull. I speak
of him because I knew him personally; but there were others of whom I
used to hear, though I never became acquainted with them, who seem to
have been hardly at all tainted with the commercial spirit, and were
more in the position of labourers than this man, yet lived almost
dignified lives of simple and self-supporting contentment. Of some of
them the middle-aged people of to-day still talk, not without respect.

But in writing of such folk I have most emphatically to use the past
tense; for although a sort of afterglow from the old civilization still
rests upon the village character, it is fast fading out, and it has not
much resemblance to the genuine thing of half a century ago. The direct
light has gone out of the people's life--the light, the meaning, the
guidance. They have no longer a civilization, but only some derelict
habits left from th