yet in store!
And so to every man who reaps a harvest from other men's labours comes
the old lesson of the responsibility for continuing the seed-sowing.

Of those whose lives have spread over the last eighty years it has been
well said that "to be borne in one world, to die in another, is, in the
case of very old people, scarcely a figure of speech," so marvellous is
the difference between the surroundings of their cradle and their
grave. Standing by the Janus at the portals of the two centuries, what
a contrast was presented in the backward and forward views! Backward
we have seen, in these glimpses of the past, men struggling with
difficulties and passing away with the seed-sowing; forward, we see
other men enter the promised land and reaping the harvest, for which
others had toiled; backward we have seen in our villages, men passing
toilsome lives in the circumscribed daily round of their native parish,
from which it was almost impossible to break away, or within the few
miles of that little world which seemed to end where the earth and sky
appeared to meet, and beyond which was a _terra incognita_; forward we
see the children from the same villages playing in merry groups on the
sands of that wonderful sea-shore of which their fathers had only heard
in song and story; and so through the many phases of the daily life of
the people.

With much that is admittedly still lacking in the village life and its
hold upon the people, the condition of the youth of an agricultural
district presents as great a contrast to-day with that of the youth of
eighty years ago, as any other condition of life can show. Then, he
trudged from the farm house to his daily round of toil, in his stiff
leather breeches, from the field back to the stable, from the stable to
the kitchen fire-place, then to bed, and up again to the stable and the
field--week in, week out, with, in many cases, not a penny to spend
from year's end to year's end; hearing no music and seeing no {192}
brightness excepting the fiddle and the dulcimer, and the dance and the
shows at the neighbouring "statty" (statute fair) at Michaelmas once a
year. His master had absolute control of his life and actions, and
sometimes would enforce it with the whip-stock. But now the farm lad
has the hardihood and the right to summon his employer before a
magistrate, goes to "Lunnon" at holiday time, walks with a stick, wears
a buttonhole in his _coat_, and, _mirabile dictu_! has