considerable difficulties to contend with in
procuring labour. He has still further difficulties in managing it when he
has got it. Most labourers have their own peculiar way of finishing a job;
and however much that style of doing it may run counter to the farmer's
idea of the matter in hand, he has to let the man proceed after his own
fashion. If he corrected, or showed the man what he wanted, he would run
the risk of not getting it done at all. There is no one so thoroughly
obstinate as an ignorant labourer full of his own consequence. Giving,
then, full credit to those men whose honest endeavours to fulfil their
duty have already been acknowledged, it is a complete delusion to suppose
that all are equally manly.

CHAPTER XXIV

THE COTTAGE CHARTER. FOUR-ACRE FARMERS

The songs sung by the labourer at the alehouse or the harvest home are not
of his own composing. The tunes whistled by the ploughboy as he goes down
the road to his work in the dawn were not written for him. Green meads and
rolling lands of wheat--true fields of the cloth of gold--have never yet
inspired those who dwell upon them with songs uprising from the soil. The
solitude of the hills over whose tops the summer sun seems to linger so
long has not filled the shepherd's heart with a wistful yearning that must
be expressed in verse or music. Neither he nor the ploughman in the vale
have heard or seen aught that stirs them in Nature. The shepherd has never
surprised an Immortal reclining on the thyme under the shade of a hawthorn
bush at sunny noontide; nor has the ploughman seen the shadowy outline of
a divine huntress through the mist that clings to the wood across the
field.

These people have no myths; no heroes. They look back on no Heroic Age, no
Achilles, no Agamemnon, and no Homer. The past is vacant. The have not
even a 'Wacht am Rhein' or 'Marseillaise' to chaunt in chorus with
quickened step and flashing eye. No; nor even a ballad of the hearth,
handed down from father to son, to be sung at home festivals, as a
treasured silver tankard is brought out to drink the health of a honoured
guest. Ballads there are in old books--ballads of days when the yew bow
was in every man's hands, and war and the chase gave life a colour; but
they are dead. A cart comes slowly down the road, and the labourer with it
sings as he jogs along; but, if you listen, it tells you nothing of wheat,
or hay, or flocks and herds, nothing of the old gods a