A JOURNAL KEPT IN THE COUNTRY. 143 



As I was on my way home, keeping under the 

 hedge-side " in the loo," as we say, I came on a very 

 old labourer standing up to shelter, a ragged sack on 

 his shoulders, the rain trickling from hat-brim and 

 nose. He told me he had been there since eleven 

 o'clock the bailiff had thought as how it looked 

 like clearing off, and had sent him to do a job of 

 gapping ; and if he had gone home it might have 

 cleared off after all. So he had eaten his dinner and 

 stood out in the rain, shifting from one wet foot to 

 the other hour by hour, and thinking, Heaven knows 

 what. 



The field he was in was poached into a red quag- 

 mire by sheep, who stood tail to the wind, motion- 

 less except for an occasional shake of their sodden 

 fleeces the whole a picture of dull wretchedness. 

 I find the old man is David Walder, eighty-four 

 next birthday, doing a full labourer's work on 

 Sacketts farm. He is crippled by rheumatism, 

 and has to walk two miles to his work every day ; 

 is looking forward with dread to the haying which 

 begins next week, and the harvest that follows, with 

 their long overtime. " I be that tired," he says. All 

 this blundering cruelty slips in, of course, between the 

 several necessary links of authority on a large estate : 

 the bailiff has no commission to ease the work of any 



