WALKS IN THE WHEAT-FIELDS. 143 
the Greck fret. People of the easel would not find it 
easy to depict the half-green, half-made hay floating in 
the air behind a haymaking machine. Sunlight falls 
on the modern implements just the same as on the old 
wooden plough and the oxen. To be true, pictures of 
our fields should have them both, instead of which all. 
the present things are usually omitted, and we are pre- 
sented with landscapes that might date from the first 
George. Turner painted the railway train and made it 
at once ideal, poetical, and classical. His ‘Rain, Steam, 
and Speed,’ which displays a modern subject, is a most 
wonderful picture. If a man chose his hour rightly, the 
steam-plough under certain atmospheric conditions would 
give him as good a subject as a Great Western train. 
He who has got the sense of beauty in his eye can find 
it in things as they really are, and needs no stagey time 
of artificial pastorals to furnish him with a sham nature. 
Idealise to the full, but idealise the real, else the picture 
is a sham. 
All the old things remain on the farm, but the village 
is driven out—the village that used to come as one man 
to the reaping. Machinery has not altered the earth, 
but it has altered the conditions of men’s lives, and as 
work decreases, so men decrease. Some go the cities, 
some emigrate ; the young men drift away, and there is 
none of that home life that there used to be. They are 
going to try to re-settle our land by altering the laws. 
Most certainly the laws ought to be altered, and must be 
altered, still it is evident to any one of dispassionate 
thought, while such immense quantities of gold are sent 
away from us, profit cannot be made in farming either 
small or great. The crop is the same in either case, and if 
there is no sale for the produce, it matters very little 
whether you farm four acres or four hundred. 
