264 LIFE AND SPORT IN HAMPSHIRE 



of his audience when he returns home, his pockets full 

 or empty. There is a spell for the English peasant 

 about the name of that land which print has done 

 little by familiarity to break. They may have been 

 paraded often in the local paper, those figures of the 

 fertile country where corn is up almost as soon as 

 in, and the ninetieth day from the act of sowing 

 sees it harvested. But in these village things is 

 virtue in hearsay which print cannot quite rival ; it is 

 fresh where the other is dry, and is so rememberable ; 

 and then it is intimate, and seems to bring the hearer 

 in touch with the soil. There is a group of villages 

 in an old haunt of Cobbett which has sent some of its 

 manhood to the corn plains since I can recall. Some- 

 times an adventurer will return, fill the place with talk 

 of Eldorado, and then disappear again for years or for 

 ever. One native came home not long since, and the 

 wonder is he has not half emptied the village of its 

 youth by his glowing tales. He told of oats thirty 

 sacks and more to the acre, of land that yielded in 

 successive seasons its heavy crop of wheat though not 

 a load of manure had been carted thither. When 

 first he returned, everything at home seemed done on 

 such a petty scale ! Ploughs at work on the sides of 

 the hill looked almost as toys; he could tell the 

 astonished villagers how his team in the great plains 

 was never less than four, and how he would ride the 

 horse instead of jolting in the furrows. 



The nature of the soil, of the seasons, the pay, the 



