f what is
called a rifle-gallery; the "feast" really and truly does not exist.
Some two or three of the old-fashioned farmers have the traditional
roast beef and plum-pudding on that day, and invite a few friends; but
this custom is passing away. In what the agricultural labourer's feast
nowadays consists no one can tell. It is an excuse for an extra quart or
two of beer, that is all.

This dulness is not, perhaps, the fault of the labourer. It may be that
it is the fault of the national character, shown more broadly in the
lower class of the population. Speaking nationally, we have no fete
days--there is no colour in our mode of life. These English
agricultural labourers have no passion plays, no peasant plays, no
rustic stage and drama, few songs, very little music. The club dinner is
the real fete of the labourer; he gets plenty to eat and drink for that
day. It is this lack of poetical feeling that makes the English
peasantry so uninteresting a study. They have no appreciation of beauty.
Many of them, it is true, grow quantities of flowers; but barely one in
a thousand could arrange those flowers in a bouquet.

The alehouse forms no inconsiderable part of the labourer's life. It is
at once his stock exchange, his reading-room, his club, and his assembly
rooms. It is here that his benefit society holds its annual dinner. The
club meetings take place weekly or monthly in the great room upstairs.
Here he learns the news of the day; the local papers are always to be
found at the public-house, and if he cannot read himself he hears the
news from those who can. In the winter he finds heat and light, too
often lacking at home; at all times he finds amusement; and who can
blame him for seizing what little pleasure lies in his way? As a rule
the beerhouse is the only place of amusement to which he can resort: it
is his theatre, his music-hall, picture-gallery, and Crystal Palace. The
recent enactments bearing upon the licensed victuallers have been rather
hard upon the agricultural labourer. No doubt they are very excellent
enactments, especially those relating to early closing; but in the
villages and outlying rural districts, where life is reduced to its most
rude and simple form, many of the restrictions are unjust, and deprive
the labourer of what he feels to be his legitimate right. Playing at
nine-pins, for instance, is practically forbidden, so also dominoes.
Now, it was a great thing to put down skittle-sharping and