ement is issued. The labourers who hear
the carter's story tell it again to their own employer next time they see
him, and the farmer meeting another farmer gossips over it again.

There has grown up a general feeling in the villages and agricultural
districts that the landed estates around them are no longer stable and
enduring. A feeling of uncertainty is abroad, and no one is surprised to
hear that some other place, or person, is going. It is rumoured that this
great landlord is about to sell as many farms as the family settlements
will let him. Another is only waiting for the majority of his son to
accomplish the same object. Others, it is said, are proceeding abroad to
retrench. Properties are coming into the market in unexpected directions,
and others are only kept back because the price of land has fallen, and
there is a difficulty in selling a large estate. If divided into a number
of lots, each of small size, land still fetches its value, and can be
readily sold; but that is not always convenient, and purchasers hesitate
to invest in extensive estates. But though kept back, efforts are being
made to retrench, and, it is said, old mansions that have never been let
before can now be hired for the season. Not only the tenant-farmers, but
the landowners are pacing through a period of depression, and their tenure
too is uncertain. Such is the talk of the country side as it comes to the
village inn.

Once a week the discordant note of a horn or bugle, loudly blown by a man
who does not understand his instrument, is heard at intervals. It is the
newspaper vendor, who, like the bill-sticker, starts from the market town
on foot, and goes through the village with a terrible din. He stops at the
garden gate in the palings before the thatched cottage, delivers his print
to the old woman or the child sent out with the copper, and starts again
with a flourish of his trumpet. His business is chiefly with the
cottagers, and his print is very likely full of abuse of the landed
proprietors as a body. He is a product of modern days, almost the latest,
and as he goes from cottage door to cottage door, the discordant uproar of
his trumpet is a sign of the times.

In some districts the osier plantations give employment to a considerable
number of persons. The tall poles are made into posts and rails; the
trunks of the pollard trees when thrown are cut into small timber that
serves many minor purposes; the brushwood or tops that are