dish of tea and a parley with our gossips,
as the steady ones of our village do, and so to bed.

That's the fair, true sketch, as far as it goes, of one of the larger
village feasts in the Vale of Berks, when I was a little boy. They
are much altered for the worse, I am told. I haven't been at one these
twenty years, but I have been at the statute fairs in some west-country
towns, where servants are hired, and greater abominations cannot be
found. What village feasts have come to, I fear, in many cases, may
be read in the pages of "Yeast" (though I never saw one so bad--thank
God!).

Do you want to know why? It is because, as I said before, gentlefolk and
farmers have left off joining or taking an interest in them. They don't
either subscribe to the prizes, or go down and enjoy the fun.

Is this a good or a bad sign? I hardly know. Bad, sure enough, if it
only arises from the further separation of classes consequent on twenty
years of buying cheap and selling dear, and its accompanying overwork;
or because our sons and daughters have their hearts in London club-life,
or so-called "society," instead of in the old English home-duties;
because farmers' sons are apeing fine gentlemen, and farmers' daughters
caring more to make bad foreign music than good English cheeses. Good,
perhaps, if it be that the time for the old "veast" has gone by; that
it is no longer the healthy, sound expression of English country
holiday-making; that, in fact, we, as a nation, have got beyond it,
and are in a transition state, feeling for and soon likely to find some
better substitute.

Only I have just got this to say before I quit the text. Don't let
reformers of any sort think that they are going really to lay hold of
the working boys and young men of England by any educational grapnel
whatever, which isn't some bona fide equivalent for the games of the
old country "veast" in it; something to put in the place of the
back-swording and wrestling and racing; something to try the muscles
of men's bodies, and the endurance of their hearts, and to make them
rejoice in their strength. In all the new-fangled comprehensive plans
which I see, this is all left out; and the consequence is, that your
great mechanics' institutes end in intellectual priggism, and your
Christian young men's societies in religious Pharisaism.

Well, well, we must bide our time. Life isn't all beer and skittles;
but beer and skittles, or something better of the same sort