detailed record of the
period of the change to the present state of things, and told us a great
deal about it, and especially of that exodus of the people from the town
to the country, and the gradual recovery by the town-bred people on one
side, and the country-bred people on the other, of those arts of life
which they had each lost; which loss, as he told us, had at one time gone
so far that not only was it impossible to find a carpenter or a smith in
a village or small country town, but that people in such places had even
forgotten how to bake bread, and that at Wallingford, for instance, the
bread came down with the newspapers by an early train from London, worked
in some way, the explanation of which I could not understand. He told us
also that the townspeople who came into the country used to pick up the
agricultural arts by carefully watching the way in which the machines
worked, gathering an idea of handicraft from machinery; because at that
time almost everything in and about the fields was done by elaborate
machines used quite unintelligently by the labourers. On the other hand,
the old men amongst the labourers managed to teach the younger ones
gradually a little artizanship, such as the use of the saw and the plane,
the work of the smithy, and so forth; for once more, by that time it was
as much as--or rather, more than--a man could do to fix an ash pole to a
rake by handiwork; so that it would take a machine worth a thousand
pounds, a group of workmen, and half a day's travelling, to do five
shillings' worth of work. He showed us, among other things, an account
of a certain village council who were working hard at all this business;
and the record of their intense earnestness in getting to the bottom of
some matter which in time past would have been thought quite trivial, as,
for example, the due proportions of alkali and oil for soap-making for
the village wash, or the exact heat of the water into which a leg of
mutton should be plunged for boiling--all this joined to the utter
absence of anything like party feeling, which even in a village assembly
would certainly have made its appearance in an earlier epoch, was very
amusing, and at the same time instructive.

This old man, whose name was Henry Morsom, took us, after our meal and a
rest, into a biggish hall which contained a large collection of articles
of manufacture and art from the last days of the machine period to that
day; and he went over them