l labour, not for
profit at all, but to minister to their own pleasure, in their gardens
and stables, and the majority of them would be genuinely glad to be
helpful to their poorer neighbours. The presence of poverty reproaches
them; their consciences are uneasy; or, better still, some kind of
regard, some kind of respect, goes out from them towards the toilsome
men and the over-burdened women whom, in fact, they have displaced. Yet
compassion is not the same thing as understanding, and the cottagers
know very well that even their best friends of this kind have neither
the knowledge nor the taste to appreciate them in their own way.
Sympathy for their troubles--yes, there is that; but sympathy with
their enjoyments hardly any property-owner dreams of cultivating; and
this is the more true the more the property-owner has been polished by
his own civilization. A lady long resident here was quite surprised to
hear from me, some months ago, that the cottagers are ardent gardeners.
"Dear me!" she said; "I had no idea of it." And yet one of the ablest
men of the parish had tended her own garden for years.

Hence it is in their intercourse with these--the well-meaning and
cultivated--that the villagers are most at a loss. In those embittered
employers who merely seek to make money out of him the labourer does at
least meet with some keen recognition of his usefulness; but with these
others he is all at sea. Non-introspective, a connoisseur of garden
crops and of pig-sties, and of saved-up seeds; cunning to understand the
"set" of spade or hoe, and the temper of scythe and fag-hook; jealous of
the encroachment of gravelled walk or evergreen hedge upon the useful
soil; an expert in digging and dunging--he is very well aware that the
praises of the villa-people employing him are ignorant praises. His best
skill is, after all, overlooked. The cunning of his craft excites in
them none of the sympathy of a fellow-expert, and is but poorly rewarded
by their undiscriminating approval. At the same time, the things which
these people require of him--the wanton things they ask him to do with
the soil, levelling it to make lawns, wasting it upon shrubberies and
drives, while they fence-in the heath patches and fence-out the
public--prove to him more fully than any language can do that they put a
different sort of value upon the countryside from its old value, and
that they care not a straw for the mode of life that was his before they
cam