62 FIELD AND HEDGEROW. 



financiers ; in village life, remember, where all is stagnant 

 and dull — no golden openings such as occur near great 

 towns. On work-days still wearing the same old hat 

 — I wonder what material it was originally ? — tough 

 leather probably — its fibres soaked with mortar, its shine 

 replaced by lime, its shape dented by bricks, its rotundity 

 flattened by timber, stuck about with cow's hair — for a 

 milker leans his head against the animal — sodden with 

 rain, and still the same old hat. The same old hat, that 

 Teniers might have introduced, a regular daub of a hat : 

 pity it is that it will never be painted. On Sundays the 

 high silk hat, the glossy black coat of the elder, but 

 there are no gloves to be got on such hands as those; 

 they are too big and too real ever to be got into the 

 artificiality of kid. Everything grew under those hands ; 

 if there was a rabbit-hutch in the back yard it became a 

 shed, and a stable sprang up by the shed, and a sawpit 

 out of the stable, and a workshop beyond the sawpit, 

 and cottages to let beyond that ; next a market garden 

 and a brick-kiln, and a hop-oast, and a few acres of free- 

 hold meadow, and by-and-by some villas ; all increasing 

 and multiplying, and leading to enterprises in distant 

 places — such a mighty generation after generation of 

 solid things ! A most earnest and conscientious chapel 

 man, welcoming the budding Paul and Silas, steadily 

 feeding the resident apostle, furnishing him with garden 

 produce and a side of bacon when the pig was killed, 

 arranging a vicarage for him at a next-to-nothing rent ; 

 lending him horse and trap, providing innumerable 

 bottles of three-star brandy for these men of God, and 

 continual pipes for the prophets ; supplying the chapel 

 fund with credit in time of monetary difficulty — the 

 very right arm and defender of the faith. 



Let the drama shift a year in one sentence in true 



