ed, along with their father and mother, in
watching a dog worry a hedgehog. And yet it is plain enough that the
faculty for compassion and kindness is inborn in the villagers, so that
their susceptibilities might just as well be keen as blunt. In their
behaviour to their pets the gentle hands and the caressing voices
betoken a great natural aptitude for tenderness. And not to their pets
only. All one afternoon I heard, proceeding from a pig-stye, the voice
of an elderly man who was watching an ailing sow there. "_Come_ on, ol'
gal ... _come_ on, ol' gal," he said, over and over again in tireless
repetition, as sympathetically as if he were talking to a child. Where
the people fail in sensitiveness is from a want of imagination, as we
say, though we should say, rather, a want of suppleness in their ideas.
They can sympathize when their own dog or cat is suffering, because use
has wakened up their powers in that direction; but they do not abstract
the idea of suffering life and apply it to the tormented hedgehog,
because their ideas have not been practised upon imagined or
non-existent things in such a way as to become, as it were, a detached
power of understanding, generally applicable.

But is it to be wondered at if some unlovely features appear in the
village character? Or is it not rather a circumstance to give one
pause, that these commercially unsuccessful and socially neglected
people, whose large families the self-satisfied eugenist views with such
solemn misgivings, should be in the main so kindly, so generous, and
sometimes so lofty in their sentiments as in fact they are? With like
disadvantages, where are there any other people in the country who would
do so bravely? If it is clear that they miss a rich development of their
susceptibilities, a reason why is no less clear. I have just hinted at
it. The ample explanation is in the fact that they have hardly any
imaginary or non-existent subjects upon which to exercise emotional
sensibility for its own sake, so that it may grow strong and fine by
frequent practice; but they have to wait for some real thing to move
them--some distressful occurrence in the valley itself, like that
mentioned earlier in this book, when a man trimming a hedge all but
killed his own child, and a thrill of horror shuddered through the
cottages. Of matters like this the people talk with an excited
fascination, there being so little else to stir them. Instead of the
moving accident by