222 THE LIFE OF THE FIELDS. 



Romantic novelettes, reprints of popular and really 

 clever stories, numbers of semi-religious essays and 

 so on — some only stitched and without a wrapper — 

 make up the show he spreads open before the cottage 

 door or the servants at the farmhouse. Often the 

 gipsy women, whose vans go slowly along the main 

 roads while they make expeditions to the isolated 

 houses in the fields, bring with them very similar 

 bundles of publications. The sale of books has thus 

 partly supplanted that of clothes-pegs and trumpery 

 finery. Neither pedlars nor gipsies would carry such 

 articles as books unless there was a demand for them, 

 and they thereby demonstrate the growth of the 

 disposition to read. 



There are no other persons engaged in circulating 

 books in the actual country than these. In the 

 windows of petty shops in villages it is common to 

 see a local newspaper displayed as a sign that it is 

 sold there; and once now and then, but not often, 

 a few children's story-books, rather dingy, may be 

 found. But the keepers of such shops are not awake 

 to the new condition of things; very likely they 

 cannot read themselves, and it does not occur to them 

 that the people now growing up may have different 

 feelings to those that were general in their own young 

 days. In this inability to observe the change they 

 are not alone. If it was explained to them, again, 

 they would not know how to set about getting ini 

 a suitable stock ; they would not know what to choose 

 nor where to buy cheaply. Somebody would have 

 to do it all for them. Practically, therefore, in the 

 actual country there are no other traders distributing 



