STIRRINGS OF NEW LIFE. 147 



nightingale under a still starlit night excites in the swaiua. 

 feeling as intense as the pipings of Pan did in ancient Greece. 

 The hill which has brooded over his village since infancy, 

 pulls at the heart-strings of many a shepherd who has watched 

 the trifolium lace the hillside with crimson and the charlock 

 weave a cloth of gold at its feet. 



To the lonely woodman the singing brook becomes a living 

 companion. The rainbow in the sky which links earth to 

 heaven rarely appears without an ejaculation from the man 

 with the hoe. Changes in the sky, the reddening of the west, 

 and the sinister rising of a grey cloud no larger than a man's 

 hand, and the race of the wind is more to the agricultural 

 labourer than the doings of Parliament, or the pronounce- 

 ments of the Church. Trudging along the lampless lanes 

 he watches with interest the sickle moon harvesting its light. 

 He has worked in too many wet shirts and under too many 

 burning suns to remain indifferent to Nature. 



Those who have lived in any intimacy with the labourer 

 know that there were two compelling forces which kept 

 men on the land who might have earned with case the 

 higher \vagcs and greater freedom of the towns. One was 

 the shackle of debt which kept them in bondage, especially 

 at the time when the children were young and unable to 

 contribute to the family funds ; the other was this love of 

 Nature, not perhaps as understood in the schools, but in 

 the peasant's way, in which was mingled a quiet but strong 

 affection for live creatures both wild and domesticated. 

 Probably the love of his horse is greater in some farm 

 \vorker than the love of his wife ! 



In the early years of the twentieth century I was con- 

 stantly working with a labourer who was one of the most 

 skilled craftsmen of the fields I have ever known. He was 

 very strong as well as skilful. His great fault was his over- 

 powering thirst, and one would have imagined that with his 

 fondness for the bottle he would live where drink was 

 most easily procured ; that is in the crowded street where the 

 tap-room door invited entrance at every hundred yards. 

 He chose, however, to live in a shed in a field by a copse where 

 the nightingales sang in April, situated about two miles 



