a bold, black-whiskered
bully, from the Potteries, hazarded a joke,--

'It's all along of this new sky-and-tough-it farming. They used to
spread the money broadcast, but now they drills it all in one place,
like bone-dust under their fancy plants, and we poor self-sown chaps
gets none.'

This garland of fancies was received with great applause; whereat
the pedlar, emboldened, proceeded to observe, mysteriously, that
'donkeys took a beating, but horses kicked at it; and that they'd
found out that in Staffordshire long ago. You want a good Chartist
lecturer down here, my covies, to show you donkeys of labouring men
that you have got iron on your heels, if you only know'd how to use
it.'

'And what's the use of rioting?' asked some one, querulously.

'Why, if you don't riot, the farmers will starve you.'

'And if we do, they'd turn sodgers--yeomanry, as they call it,
though there ain't a yeoman among them in these parts; and then they
takes sword and kills us. So, riot or none, they has it all their
own way.'

Lancelot heard many more scraps of this sort. He was very much
struck with their dread of violence. It did not seem cowardice. It
was not loyalty--the English labourer has fallen below the
capability of so spiritual a feeling; Lancelot had found out that
already. It could not be apathy, for he heard nothing but complaint
upon complaint bandied from mouth to mouth the whole evening. They
seemed rather sunk too low in body and mind,--too stupefied and
spiritless, to follow the example of the manufacturing districts;
above all, they were too ill-informed. It is not mere starvation
which goads the Leicester weaver to madness. It is starvation with
education,--an empty stomach and a cultivated, even though
miscultivated, mind.

At that instant, a huge hulking farm-boy rolled into the booth,
roaring, dolefully, the end of a song, with a punctuation of his own
invention--

'He'll maak me a lady. Zo . Vine to be zyure.
And, vaithfully; love me. Although; I; be-e; poor-r-r-r.'

Lancelot would have laughed heartily at him anywhere else; but the
whole scene was past a jest; and a gleam of pathos and tenderness
seemed to shine even from that doggerel,--a vista, as it were, of
true genial nature, in the far distance. But as he looked round
again, 'What hope,' he thought, 'of its realisation? Arcadian
dreams of pastoral innocence and graceful industry, I suppose, are