68 IDLEHURST : 



by four or five in line) are not quite perfunctory ; 

 the accompanying grin comes from the heart. The 

 gamekeeper will stop to talk, with friendly salute ; 

 and you find him equally free from any touch of 

 servility or insolence, unassuming, with natural good 

 manners. The labourers, hoeing solitary in the 

 remote fields or lopping underwood by the roadside, 

 answer the wanderer's good-day cheerily, neither 

 forward nor sullen. But down in the village we are 

 in evil case. At thirteen years or so the boys with 

 great punctuality begin to " go to the bad." Good 

 little boys they may have been till that climacteric 

 even good with the superiority of Sunday-school- 

 book heroes ; but soon or late they become what 

 the village calls " Radicals," and it is not a pleasant 

 metamorphosis. They loaf most of the day at shop- 

 windows and lane-corners ; the badge of their 

 emancipation is the cigarette, which is fast displacing 

 the bullseye in the small grocer's window. They 

 avoid all appearance of work ; if caught and cate- 

 chised on the subject, they profess a desire for a 

 "place as house-boy," the small knife-cleaning job 

 that entails kitchen fires and odd meals and large 

 spaces of leisure, and leads to no permanent employ. 

 A very few, possessing rigid fathers with conservative 

 notions, are put to gardening or serving in shops. 



