142 FIELD AND HEDGEROW, 



the force of modern ideas should succeed in dividing the 

 land among small occupiers, the flail will become as 

 common as ever. 



There was an old waggon shown at the Royal 

 Agricultural Show in London said to be two hundred 

 years old ; probably it had had so many new wheels, and 

 shafts, and sides, as to have physiologically changed its 

 constitution — still there were waggons in those days, and 

 there are waggons now. Express trains go by in a great 

 hurry — the slow waggons gather up the warm hay and 

 the yellow wheat, just as they did hundreds of years 

 since. The broad-browed oxen guided by the ancient 

 goad draw the old wooden plough over the slopes of the 

 Downs, though the telegraph wires are in sight. You 

 may see men sowing broadcast just as they did a 

 thousand years ago on the broad English acres. Yet 

 the light iron plough, and the heavy drill with its four 

 horses, the steam-plough, winnowing machines, root- 

 pulpers, are manufactured and cast out into the fields, 

 and machinery, machinery, machinery, still increases. 



If I were a painter I should like to paint all this ; I 

 should like to paint a great steam-ploughing engine and 

 its vast wheels, with its sweep of smoke, sometimes drift- 

 ing low over the fallow, sometimes rising into the air in 

 regular shape, like the pine tree of Pliny over Pompeii's 

 volcano. A wonderful effect it has in the still air ; 

 sweet white violets in a corner by the hedge still there 

 in all their beauty. For I think that the immense 

 realism of the iron wheels makes the violet yet more 

 lovely ; the more they try to drive out Nature with a 

 fork the more she returns, and the soul clings the 

 stronger to the wild flowers. I should like to paint the 

 lessening square of the wheat-field, the reaping machine 

 continually cutting the square smaller, as if it traversed 



