A JOURNAL KEPT IN THE COUNTRY. 13 



providing for after the first cold turn of the winter ; 

 and Dr. Culpeper's death-warrants, when he rarely 

 signs one, are so sure in Arnington experience that 

 we agree without doubts to enlarge the tobacco allow- 

 ance, and spend the little balance improvidently 

 before March twelvemonth. 



Yesterday, the Rector tells me, he was out at 

 Jolland's Corner, with Obed Backshell when he died ; 

 another of the old race, a survivor of a world as far 

 from ours as the Renaissance, the world before the 

 railways, with wide margins and easy paces, wherein 

 the labourers, to judge from such relics as Backshell 

 and Tomsett, were more courteous than half the new 

 gentry now upon the land, and, in one direction at 

 least, much better instructed ; a world the Rector and 

 I conspire to regret. Old Backshell died with that 

 fine apathy common to his race. As year by year 

 the knell rings for such and such an acquaintance, 

 the old men will moralise, " Us must go when we be 

 called ; " and when at last they know that to-night 

 or to-morrow the clerk will slowly climb the crooked 

 stairs, and pull the old rope for their own knell, 

 they take it with a wonderful sense of proportion, 

 with a sense of their place in the natural course of the 

 world, which eighty years' monotonous labour on the 

 land, under the changeless change of the seasons, 



