as understanding
the people's disposition. It is the principal gateway that lets you in
to their character. Nevertheless the subject needs no further
illustration here. Anyone personally acquainted with the villagers knows
how their life is one continuous act of unconscious self-reliance, and
those who have not seen it for themselves will surely discover plentiful
evidences of it in the following pages, if they read between the lines.

But I must digress to remark upon one aspect of the matter. In view of
the subject of this book--namely, the transition from an old social
order to present times--it should be considered whether the handiness of
the villagers is after all quite so natural a thing as is commonly
supposed. For a long time I took it for granted. The people's
accomplishments were rough, I admit, and not knowing how much "knack" or
experience was involved in the dozens of odd jobs that they did, I
assumed that they did them by the light of Nature. Yet if we reflect how
little we learn from Nature, and how helpless people grow after two or
three generations of life in slums, or in libraries and drawing-rooms,
it would seem probable that there is more than appears on the surface in
the labourer's versatility of usefulness. After all, who would know by
the light of Nature how to go about sweeping a chimney, as they used to
do it here, with rope and furzebush dragged down? or how to scour out a
watertank effectively? or where to begin upon cleaning a pigstye? Easy
though it looks, the closer you get down to this kind of work as the
cottager does it the more surprisedly do you discover that he recognizes
right and wrong methods of doing it; and my own belief is that the
necessity which compels the people to be their own servants would not
make them so adaptable as they are, were there not, at the back of them,
a time-honoured tradition teaching them how to go on.

Returning from this digression, and speaking, too, rather of a period
from ten to twenty years ago than of the present time, it would be
foolish to pretend that the people's good qualities were unattended by
defects. The men had a very rough exterior, so rough that I have known
them to inspire timidity in the respectable who met them on the road,
and especially at night, when, truth to tell, those of them who were
out were not always too sober. After you got to know them, so as to
understand the shut of their mouths and the look of their eyes--usually