CHAPTER III. 



WEAVING AND A VILLAGE OF WEAVERS AT THE 

 BEGINNING OF THE CENTURY. 



BUT the lad had now reached his fifteenth year, and must 

 choose a profession for life. Was he to remain at farm work 

 and become a ploughman ? All his instincts turned from 

 such a heavy, unintellectual, bucolic future. He was too 

 keen, too active, too clever, to walk " between the stilts " all 

 his life. He had tried it. He first accompanied the plough- 

 man as " gaudsman," to " goad " and guide the horses, and 

 had, in time, held the plough. But the more he essayed it, 

 the more he felt its utter incompatibility. His intercourse 

 with farm servants and increased knowledge of the life they 

 led, now extending over nearly five years, had not been 

 encouraging, either morally or intellectually. 



The agricultural population of all countries, through 

 many causes incidental to their condition, has always been 

 much behind the rest of the nation in intellectual activity, if 

 not in moral habit, since long before the time of the 

 Athenians with their Boeotian neighbours. Even yet, with 

 all the modern ameliorations in implements, work, and time, 

 the exercise of intelligence evoked by their life is not very 

 high. At the beginning of the century, with their old-world 

 appliances, long hours, exhausting if not oppressive toil, and 



