flood or field, they have the squalid or merely
agonizing accident. Sickness amongst friends or neighbours affords
another topic upon which their emotion seeks exercise: they linger over
the discussion of it, talking in moaning tones instinctively intended to
stimulate feeling. Then there are police-court cases. Some man gets
drunk, and is fined; or cannot pay his rent, and is turned out of his
cottage; or misbehaves in such a way that he is sent to gaol. The talk
of it threads its swift way about the village--goes into intimate
details, too, relating how the culprit's wife "took on" when her man was
sentenced; or how his children suffer; or perhaps how the magistrates
bullied him, or how he insulted the prosecuting lawyer.

It is natural that the people should be greedy readers (when they can
read at all) of the sensational matter supplied by newspapers.
Earthquakes, railway disasters, floods, hurricanes, excite them not
really disagreeably. So, too, does it animate them to hear of prodigies
and freaks of Nature, as when, a little while ago, the papers told of a
man whose flesh turned "like marble," so that he could not bend his
limbs for fear lest they should snap. Anything to wonder at will serve;
anything about which they can exclaim. That feeling of the crowd when
fireworks call forth the fervent "_O-oh!_" of admiration, is the village
feeling which delights in portents of whatever kind. But nothing else is
quite so effectual to that end as are crimes of violence, and especially
murder. For, after all, it is the human element that counts; and these
descendants of peasants, having no fictitious means of acquainting
themselves with human passion and sentiment, such as novels and dramas
supply in such abundance to other people, turn with all the more
avidity to the unchosen and unprepared food furnished to their starving
faculties by contemporary crime.

There is, indeed, another side to their sensationalism which should be
noticed. I was a little startled some years ago by a scrap of
conversation between two women. The papers at that time were full of a
murder which had been committed in a village neighbouring this, the
young man accused of it being even then on his trial. It was in the
evidence that he had visited his home quite an hour after the time when
the deed must have been done, and these women were discussing that
point, one of them saying: "I don't believe _my_ boy would ha' come 'ome
that Sunday night if