he labourer can hardly look from his door
without seeing up or down the valley some sign or other telling of the
invasion of a new people, unsympathetic to his order. He sees, and hears
too. As he sweats at his gardening, the sounds of piano-playing come to
him, or of the affected excitement of a tennis-party; or the braying of
a motor-car informs him that the rich who are his masters are on the
road. And though the man should go into his cottage and shut the door,
these things must often have for him a sinister meaning which he cannot
so easily shut out. There is a vague menace in them. They betoken to all
the labouring people that their old home is no longer quite at their own
disposal, but is at the mercy of a new class who would willingly see
their departure.

Perhaps the majority do not feel themselves personally threatened;
nevertheless, the situation is disquieting for all. Before the
property-owners came, and while still the population was homogeneous, a
sort of continuity in the life of the valley impressed itself upon one's
consciousness, giving a sense of security. Here amidst the heaths a
laborious and frugal people, wise in their own fashion, had their home
and supplied their own wants. Not one of them probably thought of the
significance of it all, or understood how the village traditions were
his inheritance; not one considered what it meant to him to belong to
the little group of folk and be independent of the whims of strangers.
Yet, for all that, there was comfort in the situation. To be so familiar
as the people were with the peculiarities of the valley, to appreciate
the usefulness of the wide heath-land, to value the weather, to
comprehend at a glance the doings of the neighbours, and to have
fellow-feeling with their motives and hopes and disappointments, was to
be at home most intimately, most safely. But all this is a thing of the
past. To-day, when the labourer looks around, much of what he sees in
the new houses, roads, fences, and so on, has, indeed, been produced by
his own handiwork, but it is a product in the enjoyment of which he has
no share. It has nothing to do with him and his people; on the contrary,
it announces the break-up of the traditional industries by which he
lived, and the disintegration of the society of which he was a member.
It follows that a certain suggestiveness which used to dignify the home
pursuits of the village is wanting to them now. Instead of being a part
of the