ses; wheat
was universally reaped with a sickle, and as universally threshed with
a flail, the bent figure of the wheat-barn tasker being a familiar
object in the "big old barn with its gloomy bays and the moss upon the
thatch." An honest pride he took in his work and has found a fit
memorial in the delightful _Sketches of Rural Life_ by Mr. Francis
Lucas, of Hitchin, who says of the tasker and his work--

Then let our floors send up the sound,
Of the swinjel's measured stroke,
It makes the miller's wheel go round,
And the cottage chimneys smoke.

One of the most interesting things about rural life was the common
herding of the cattle, which, until the Enclosures Act came, had
probably gone on from the time the Domesday Book was written, or
longer. All through the ages there is the picturesque glimpse of the
old herdsman with his horn, each morning and evening from May to
October, making his procession to the common land of the village, past
homesteads, from whose open gates the cow-kine, in obedience to the
blast of the horn, walk out and join their fellows, and at evening the
herd in returning dropped its ones, twos, and threes at every farmyard
gate--like children going to and from school! The animation among the
cattle in and about every farmyard in the village, when, after six
months' silence, the herdman's horn was heard once more, was a sight to
remember, and a remarkable instance of the sagacity of animals!

Farmers' wives were accustomed, up to the beginning of the present
century, to attend the market to sell their cheese and butter, as in
Derbyshire they do now, and the work connected with the accidental
discovery of the Royston Cave, it will be remembered, was for the
accommodation of these good dames.

Farmers at this time had few new notions or agricultural shows to set
them thinking, but farmed according to "the good old ways," leaving to
here and there a gentleman farmer, farming his own land, such
hair-brained schemes as went contrary to them, their plea being that
"farmers did not rear the worse turnips nor were longer fatting their
oxen without book knowledge than they would be with it."

{106}

But it is when we come to market prices for the farmer's produce that
we get, I suspect, at the root and origin of the smooth-sounding phrase
of the "Good old times when George the III. was King." Of the enormous
influence of peace or war upon prices then, and the excitement which
news o