the farm hailed its arrival.
With grave faces and indifferent manner they ground the apples, and
departed as slowly and deliberately as they came; verily men of the
autumn, harbingers of the fall of the year.

As I dreamed with the honeysuckle over my shoulder, and Antares
southwards, Hilary talked at intervals about his wheat as usual and
the weather, but I only caught fragments of it. All the signs were
propitious, and as it had been a fine harvest under similar conditions
before, people said it would be fine this time. But, unlike the law,
the weather acknowledged no precedent, and nobody could tell, though
folk now thought they knew everything. How all things had changed
since the Queen ascended the throne! Not long since Hilary was talking
with a labourer, an elderly man, who went to the feast in Overboro'
town on the day of the coronation. The feast was held in the
market-place, and the puddings, said the old fellow regretfully, were
so big they were brought in on hand-barrows.

It was difficult since he himself remembered even to learn the state
of the markets. So few newspapers came into country places that before
service on Sundays the farmers gathered round anybody in the
churchyard who was known to take in a paper, to get particulars from
this fortunate individual. Letters rarely came to the farmhouse door
then. The old postman made a very good thing of his office--people
were so eager for news, and it was easy to take a magpie glance at a
newspaper. So he called at the butcher's before he started out, and in
exchange for a peep at the paper got a little bit of griskin, or a
chop, and at the farmhouses as he passed they gave him a few eggs, and
at the inns a drop of gin. Thus a dozen at least read scraps before it
reached the rightful owner.

If anything very extraordinary had happened he would shout it out as
he went through the hamlet. Hilary said he well remembered being up on
the roof of the house one morning, mending the thatch, when suddenly a
voice--it was the postman's--cried from the road, 'Royal Exchange
burned down!' In this way news got about before the present facilities
were afforded. But some of the old folk still regretted the change and
believed that we should some day be punished for our worship of steam.
Steam had brought us to rely on foreign countries for our corn, and a
day would come when through a war, or a failure of the crops there,
the vast population of this country would be in