142 FIELD AND HEDGEROW. 
the force of modern ideas should succeed in dividing the 
land among small occupiers, the flail will become as 
common as ever. 
There was an old waggon shown at the Royal 
Agricultural Show in London said to be two hundred 
years old ; probably it had had so many new wheels, and 
shafts, and sides, as to have physiologically changed its 
constitution —still there were waggons in those days, and 
there are waggons now. Express trains go byin a great 
hurry—the slow waggons gather up the warm hay and 
the yellow wheat, just as they did hundreds of years 
since. The broad-browed oxen guided by the ancient 
goad draw the old wooden plough over the slopes of the 
Downs, though the telegraph wires are in sight. You 
may see men sowing broadcast just as they did a 
thousand years ago on the broad English acres, Yet 
the light iron plough, and the heavy drill with its four 
horses, the steam-plough, winnowing machines, root- 
pulpers, are manufactured and cast out into the fields, 
and machinery, machinery, machinery, still increases. 
If I were a painter I should like to paint all this; I 
should like to paint a great steam-ploughing engine and 
its. vast wheels, with its sweep of smoke, sometimes drift- 
ing low over the fallow, sometimes rising into the air in 
regular shape, like the pine tree of Pliny over Pompeii’s 
volcano. A wonderful effect it has in the still air; 
sweet white violets in a corner by the hedge still there 
in all their beauty. For I think that the immense 
realism of the iron wheels makes the violet yet more 
lovely ; the more they try to drive out Nature with a 
fork the more she returns, and the soul clings the 
stronger to the wild flowers. I should like to paint the 
lessening square of the wheat-field, the reaping machine 
continually cutting the square smaller, as if it traversed 
