THE NATURAL MAN 251 



spring up thickly enough, and thrive so long as a 

 fostering hand thinned and pricked them out, and 

 shut the frame against the least nip of frost, and 

 opened it to the sun. But put these tender things 

 into the open, and let them shift for themselves in 

 the struggle of every day, and they must wither and 

 die. Few of these plants, I fear, would be fitted for a 

 world of frosts and droughts and blight. 



Thrift, such as must be the stem daily exercise of 

 the natural smallholder, can have in cases, I recognise, 

 an ill-ending. The village miser who owned Hawk's 

 Perch, the shanty at the wood edge, was an instance 

 of this. Up to a certain rung his rise on the ladder 

 might scarcely be distinguished from that of the 

 peasant type that we value greatly. He rose, I sus- 

 pect, by sure inches very much in the way we asso- 

 ciate with sterling peasant quality. A pig at the 

 start ; later a cow and a plot of meadow and a little 

 wooden shed to house his live stock in a shed 

 knocked together by himself. I remember, too, that 

 this man who died worth thousands in kind and 

 sterling securities opened a mean little village shop. 

 Its window often held a row of apples and plums 

 grown in his own garden, and some trifling crockery 

 and boot laces. It was hard to believe that money 

 could be made out of this musty little business, seeing 

 that anything the man sold was sold in at least as 

 good measure at the large shop of all wares across 

 the road. Yet it had patrons, and was worth keeping 



