144 FIELD AND HEDGEROW. 



New hats and jackets, but the same old faces. A 

 stout old farmer sat at the side of his barn door on the 

 hatch leaning against the post. His body was as rotund 

 as a full sack of wheat, his great chin and his great cheeks 

 were full ; a man very solidly set as it were, and he eyed 

 me, a stranger, as I passed down the lane, with mistrust 

 and suspicion in every line of his face. Out of the hunting 

 season a stranger might perhaps have been seen there 

 once in six months, and this was that once. The British 

 bull-dog growled in his countenance — very likely 

 pleasantness itself to those he knew, grimness itself to ; 

 others. The sunlight fell full into the barn, the great j 

 doors wide open ; there were sacks on the other] 

 side of the door piled up inside, a heap of grain, 

 and two men turning the winches of a winnowing 

 machine. New hats, but old faces. Could his great- 

 great-grandfather have been dug up and set in that barn 

 door, he would have looked just the same, so would the 

 sacks, and the wheat, and the sunshine. At the market 

 town, where the auctioneer's hammer goes tap tap over 

 bullocks and sheep, crowds of men gather together, 

 — farmers, and bailiffs, and shepherds, drovers and 

 labourers — and their clothes are different, but there are 

 the same old weather-beaten faces. Faces that you may 

 see in the ancient illuminated manuscripts, in the realistic 

 wood engravings of early printed books, in the etchings 

 of last century, the same lines and expression. The 

 earth has marked them all. In a modern country sketch 

 or picture you would not find them, they would be 

 smoothed away — drawing-room faces, made transparent 

 in attitudes like easy-limbed girls delicately proportioned 

 These are not country people. Country people are the 

 same now in appearance as when the old artists 

 honestly drew them ; sturdy and square, bulky and 



