r
Australian line, or of both; and the editor is their agent. When the young
ploughman resolves to quit the hamlet for the backwoods of America or the
sheepwalks of Australia, he comes here to engage his berth. When the young
farmer wearies of waiting for dead men's shoes--in no other way can he
hope to occupy an English farm--he calls here and pays his passage-money,
and his broad shoulders and willing hands are shipped to a land that will
welcome him. A single shelf supports a few books, all for reference, such
as the 'Clergy List,' for the Church is studied, and the slightest change
that concerns the district carefully recorded.

Beneath this, the ponderous volumes that contain the file of the paper for
the last forty years are piled, their weight too great for a shelf resting
on the floor. The series constitutes a complete and authentic local
history. People often come from a distance to consult it, for it is the
only register that affords more than the simple entry of birth and death.

There is a life in the villages and hamlets around, in the little places
that are not even hamlets, which to the folk who dwell in them is fully as
important as that of the greatest city. Farmhouses are not like the villas
of cities and city suburbs. The villa has hardly any individuality; it is
but one of many, each resembling the other, and scarcely separated. To-day
one family occupies it, tomorrow another, next year perhaps a third, and
neither of these has any real connection with the place. They are
sojourners, not inhabitants, drawn thither by business or pleasure; they
come and go, and leave no mark behind. But the farmhouse has a history.
The same family have lived in it for, perhaps, a hundred years: they have
married and intermarried, and become identified with the locality. To them
all the petty events of village life have a meaning and importance: the
slow changes that take place and are chronicled in the old newspaper have
a sad significance, for they mark that flux of time which is carrying
them, too, onwards to their rest.

These columns of the file, therefore, that to a stranger seem a blank, to
the old folk and their descendants are like a mirror, in which they can
see the faces of the loved ones who passed away a generation since. They
are the archives of the hamlets round about: a farmer can find from them
when his grandfather quitted the old farm, and read an account of the
sale. Men who left the village in thei