THE AFTERMATH OF THISTLES. 91 



labourers show themselves blind to the aesthetic element, though 

 a professed ' aesthetician/ as the American journalists call Mr. 

 Oscar Wilde, might possibly have laughed at their decorative 

 effects, and yet even he would have admitted the beauty of a 

 great bunch of red and white roses placed on the table. The wall 

 pictures formed a dream of fair women, and apparently had been 

 cut from calendars, cheap newspapers, and advertisement sheets. 

 As these ploughmen Benedicts took their tea, their eyes were 

 feasted on the features of Miss Fortesque, and Miss Mary Ander- 

 son, Miss Maud Millet and the Alhambra ballet girls, in addition 

 to highly idealised Juliets, Beatrices and other stock subjects 

 for the illustration ' given away with this number'. 



" The beds were up in what had once been a loft, and were 

 the strong iron variety standing on clean-swept, uncovered deal, 

 and looking clean to say the least of it. Until they came together 

 at the preceding term, they had all been strangers to one another, 

 the men said. They liked the life ' fine,' and did not feel at all 

 dull. On winter nights they amused themselves with draughts, 

 and one of their number played the concertina. Occasionally 

 they moved the table out of their living room and managed to 

 get up a dance. ' With the house servants as partners ? ' I 

 suggested, and a general smile seemed to show that they were 

 not without female visitors occasionally. Youths placed as 

 they were are almost certain to indulge in more or less wild 

 ' larks,' which, when the prevailing influence happened to be bad, 

 easily degenerated into absolute vice. But with all its drawbacks 

 the bothy system is an improvement on that which it superseded. 

 Not so very long ago each of these men would have been boarded 

 in a strange family where the chances were distinctly in favour 

 of there being a crowded cottage with grown-up women who 

 would have had to sleep, it might be in the same room, but 

 certainly in close proximity to them. It was even worse when 

 a young woman field-worker came into a strange family with 

 full-grown sons. But the more scandalous outrages on decency 

 have now become so rare and are so surely disappearing that it 

 is unnecessary to do more than give them a passing reference." 1 



Dr. Jessopp, too, did not dwell entirely on the seamy side 

 of Arcady. He found great satisfaction in the labourer 

 earning as much as us. a week with additional sums at 

 haysel, harvest and turnip hoeing, and a strange exhilaration 

 in the spectacle of four of them driving home from work 

 each in his own donkey cart. He said he felt proud that he 

 was an Englishman when he saw such a sight as that in 



1 The Rural Exodus, by P. Anderson Graham. 



