62 FIELD AND HEDGEROW. 
tinancicrs ; in village life, remember, where all is stagnant 
and dull—no golden openings such as occur near great 
towns. On work-days still wearing the same old hat 
—I wonder what material it was originally p—tough 
leather probably—its fibres soaked with mortar, its shine 
replaced by lime, its shape dented by bricks, its rotundity 
flattened by timber, stuck about with cow’s hair—for a 
milker leans his head against the animal—sodden with 
rain, and still the same old hat. The same old hat, that 
Teniers might have introduced, a regular daub of a hat: © 
pity it is that it will never be painted. On Sundays the 
high silk hat, the glossy black coat of the elder, but 
there are no gloves to be got on such hands as those; 
they are too big and too real ever to be got into the 
artificiality of kid. Everything grew under those hands ; 
if there was a rabbit-hutch in the back yard it became a 
shed, and a stable sprang up by the shed, and a sawpit 
out of the stable, and a workshop beyond the sawpit, 
and cottages to let beyond that ; next a market garden 
and a brick-kiln, and a hop-oast, and a few acres of free- 
hold meadow, and by-and-by some villas ; all increasing 
and multiplying, and leading to enterprises in distant 
places—such a mighty generation after generation of 
solid things! A most earnest and conscientious chapel ° 
man, welcoming the budding Paul and Silas, steadily 
feeding the resident apostle, furnishing him with garden 
produce and a side of bacon when the pig. was killed, 
arranging a vicarage for him at a next-to-nothing rent; 
Iending him horse and trap, providing innumerable 
bottles of three-star brandy for these men of God, and 
continual pipes for the prophets ; supplying the chapel 
fund with credit in time of monetary difficulty—tlic 
very right arm and defender of the faith. 
Let the drama shift a year in one sentence in true 
