The Open Air 



age. That only makes us more sorrowful, and 

 anxious that things should be different. I do not 

 suppose we should think about them had we not been 

 in man's hand so long that now we have got to feel 

 with man. Every year makes it more pitiful because 

 then there are more flowers gone, and added to the 

 vast numbers of those gone before, and never gathered 

 or looked at, though they could have given so much 

 pleasure. And all the work and labour, and thinking, 

 and reading and learning that your people do ends in 

 nothing not even one flower. We cannot under- 

 stand why it should be so. There are thousands of 

 wheat-ears in this field, more than you would know 

 how to write down with your pencil, though you have 

 learned your tables, sir. Yet all of us thinking, and 

 talking, cannot understand why it is when we con- 

 sider how clever your people are, and how they bring 

 ploughs, and steam-engines, and put up wires along 

 the roads to tell you things when you are miles away, 

 and sometimes we are sown where we can hear the 

 hum, hum, all day of the children learning in the 

 school. The butterflies flutter over us, and the sun 

 shines, and the doves are very, very happy at their 

 nest, but the children go on hum, hum inside this 

 house, and learn, learn. So we suppose you must be 

 very clever, and yet you cannot manage this. All 

 your work is wasted, and you labour in vain you 

 dare not leave it a minute. 



" If you left it a minute it would all be gone; it 

 does not mount up and make a store, so that all of 

 you could sit by it and be happy. Directly you leave 

 off you are hungry, and thirsty, and miserable like the 

 beggars that tramp along the dusty road here. All 

 the thousand years of labour since this field was first 

 ploughed have not stored up anything for you. It 



18 



