ons--to accumulate a village
fortune by saving fifty pounds a year, it does not occupy so long to
reduce a farmer to poverty when half that sum is annually lost. There was
no strongly marked and radical defect in his system of farming to amount
for it; it was the muddling, and the muddling only, that did it. His work
was blind. He would never miss giving the pigs their dinner, he rose at
half-past three in the morning, and foddered the cattle in the grey dawn,
or milked a certain number of cows, with unvarying regularity. But he had
no foresight, and no observation whatever. If you saw him crossing a
field, and went after him, you might walk close behind, placing your foot
in the mark just left by his shoe, and he would never know it. With his
hands behind his back, and his eyes upon the ground, he would plod across
the field, perfectly unconscious that any one was following him. He
carried on the old rotation of cropping in the piece of arable land
belonging to the farm, but in total oblivion of any advantage to be
obtained by local change of treatment. He could plan nothing out for next
year. He spent nothing, or next to nothing, on improved implements; but,
on the other hand, he saved nothing, from a lack of resource and
contrivance.

As the years went by he fell out of the social life of the times; that is,
out of the social life of his own circle. He regularly fed the pigs; but
when he heard that the neighbours, were all going in to the town to attend
some important agricultural meeting, or to start some useful movement, he
put his hands behind his back and said that he should not go; he did not
understand anything about it. There never used to be anything of that
sort. So he went in to luncheon on bread and cheese and small ale. Such a
course could only bring him into the contempt of his fellow-men. He became
a nonentity. No one had any respect for or confidence in him. Otherwise,
possibly, he might have obtained powerful help, for the memory of what his
family had been had not yet died out.

Men saw that he lived and worked as a labourer; they gave him no credit
for the work, but they despised him for the meanness and churlishness of
his life. There was neither a piano nor a decanter of sherry in his house.
He was utterly out of accord with the times. By degrees, after many years,
it became apparent to all that he was going downhill. The stock upon the
farm was not so large nor of so good a character as had been