216 THE LIFE OF THE FIELDS 



There was no prejudice, for no people admired learn- 

 ing more than the village people, or gave it more 

 willing precedence. It was simple indifference, which 

 \vas mistaken for a lack of intelligence, but it was 

 most certainly nothing of the kind. How great, then, 

 must be the change when at last, after four hundred 

 years, the country begins to read ! 



To read everything and anything ! The cottagers 

 in far-away hamlets, miles from a railway station, read 

 every scrap of printed paper that drifts across their 

 way, like leaves in autumn. The torn newspapers in 

 which the grocer at the market town wraps up their 

 weekly purchases, stained with tallow or treacle, are 

 not burned heedlessly. Some paragraph, some frag- 

 ment of curious information, is gathered from the 

 pieces. The ploughman at his luncheon reads the 

 scrap of newspaper in which his bread-and-cheese was 

 packed for him. Men read the bits of paper in which 

 they carry their screws of tobacco. The stone-pickers 

 in spring in the meadows, often women, look at the bits 

 of paper scattered here and there before putting them 

 in their baskets. A line here and a line yonder, one 

 to-day, one to-morrow, in time make material equal 

 to a book. All information in our day filters through 

 the newspapers. There is no subject you can name of 

 which you may not get together a good body of 

 knowledge, often superior, because more recent, than 

 that contained in the best volumes, by watching the 

 papers and cutting out the paragraphs that relate to 

 it. No villager does that, but this ceaseless searching 

 for scraps comes to something like the same thing in 

 a more general manner. 



