148 ENGLISH AGRICULTURAL LABOURER 



from the nearest public house, which, owing to his violence 

 when " in liquor," he was prohibited from entering. 



Rough, uneducated, and drunken in his habits though 

 he was, yet he had a love for Nature akin to the love of a poet. 

 He would tell me that the sunset reminded him of the colours 

 in a brooch he once saw gracing a farmer's wife. With 

 hands torn by bramble, he would, with the light of pleasure 

 in his eyes, bring from the woods in which he trespassed 

 without hesitation " purty leetle " roots of periwinkle which 

 he called when variegated " barnicated winkle," besides 

 cowslips and primroses, which he loved for their pale beauty 

 and knew that my wife loved too. He once asked her to 

 give him a few crocus bulbs because they were " like leetle 

 bits o' sun," to plant round his battered old shed. 



Another man, brought up as a ploughboy, possessed a 

 love of the country which was as indestructible, for he 

 chose to remain in a part of Sussex where he once hoed 

 in a field alone for four months without seeing a soul 

 from morning to night ; and one of these fields in which 

 he was the sole worker was 650 paces wide. In spite of the 

 fact that his employer was a hard man, for on one occasion, 

 on a very wet day, finding that my old friend was taking 

 shelter under a hedge he ordered him out to hoe in a field 

 where he had to wade knee-deep in mangold leaves in 

 spite of such experiences he remained true to his love of the 

 soil and to-day is cultivating a small holding of his own. 

 Being a handy man not only with the hoe and the billhook, 

 but also with the hammer and chisel, he could have found a 

 more profitable job in the towns, but he stayed where he could 

 hear the hum of the bees, which he handled with the tender- 

 ness of a woman for a child, and where he could watch the 

 sheep like a string of pearls encircling the shoulder of the 

 Downs. 



Lieut-Col. Pedder, in an article 1 vividly descriptive of 

 rural life at this time, mentions this deep love of the labourer 

 for the land. 



" ' Farm-service ' is still subjugation. It yokes and goads and 

 brutalises. Men are still dismissed if their acquaintances do not 

 1 Contemporary Review, February, 1903. 



