ate house available: there is no room
for a card-party in their cottages; and thus they become subject to laws
which, as they do not touch the property-owner, seem designed to catch
especially them. For another example of the same insinuation of
inequality, consider the local by-laws, which now forbid the keeping of
pigs within a considerable distance of a dwelling-house. I will not say
that the villager thinks the regulation a wrong one; at any rate he
understands that it is excused in the interests of public health. But he
also knows that it has been introduced since the arrival of middle-class
people in the parish. They came, and his pigs had to go; so that in his
eyes even the general public health looks like the health of rich
residents rather than of poor ones.

The people display little resentment; they accept their position with
equanimity. Nevertheless it drives them in upon themselves. Observing
the conditions, and yielding to them as to something inherent in the
nature of things, they strive to keep out of the way of the superior
classes. They are an aloof population, though not as their ancestors
were. They are fenced out from the country; they cannot with security go
into enclosed wood or coppice; they must keep to the public way, and
there they must behave so as not to disturb the employing classes.
Accordingly, all up and down the valley they restrict themselves more
and more soberly to their gardens and cottages, dreading few things so
much as a collision with those impersonal forces which seem always to
side with property and against people like them.

XIII

NOTICE TO QUIT

It might be thought that at least when they are at home the people would
be untroubled; yet that is not the case. Influences from the new
civilization reach them in their cottages, and the intrusion is but the
more searching for being impersonal.

It is borne in upon the senses in the shape of sights and sounds
proclaiming across the valley that the village is an altered place, that
the modern world is submerging it, that the old comfortable seclusion is
gone. Even the obscurity of winter nights does not veil that truth; for
where, but a few years ago, the quiet depths of darkness were but
emphasized by a few glimmering cottage lights, there is now a more
brilliant sparkling of lit-up villa windows, while northwards the sky
has a dull glare from new road-lamps which line the ridge on its town
side. As for the daytime, t