ifficulty, and he could not see the sign-post, nor
the familiar red-bricked farmhouse. He knew all the rain that had fallen
must have come through the thatch of the old cottage in at least one
place, and he would have liked to have gone and rethatched it with
trembling hand. At home he could lift the latch of the garden gate and go
down the road when he wished. Here he could not go outside the
boundary--it was against the regulations. Everything to appearance had
been monotonous in the cottage--but there he did not feel it monotonous.

At the workhouse the monotony weighed upon him. He used to think as he lay
awake in bed that when the spring came nothing should keep him in this
place. He would take his discharge and go out, and borrow a hoe from
somebody, and go and do a bit of work again, and be about in the fields.
That was his one hope all through his first winter. Nothing else enlivened
it, except an occasional little present of tobacco from the guardians who
knew him. The spring came, but the rain was ceaseless. No work of the kind
he could do was possible in such weather. Still there was the summer, but
the summer was no improvement; in the autumn he felt weak, and was not
able to walk far. The chance for which he had waited had gone. Again the
winter came, and he now rapidly grew more feeble.

When once an aged man gives up, it seems strange at first that he should
be so utterly helpless. In the infirmary the real benefit of the workhouse
reached him. The food, the little luxuries, the attention were far
superior to anything he could possibly have had at home. But still it was
not home. The windows did not permit him from his bed to see the leafless
trees or the dark woods and distant hills. Left to himself, it is certain
that of choice he would have crawled under a rick, or into a hedge, if he
could not have reached his cottage.

The end came very slowly; he ceased to exist by imperceptible degrees,
like an oak-tree. He remained for days in a semi-unconscious state,
neither moving nor speaking. It happened at last. In the grey of the
winter dawn, as the stars paled and the whitened grass was stiff with hoar
frost, and the rime coated every branch of the tall elms, as the milker
came from the pen and the young ploughboy whistled down the road to his
work, the spirit of the aged man departed.

What amount of production did that old man's life of labour represent?
What value must be put upon the service of the s