ment can be found for them than the beer-shop. Can't they
read? Can't they practise light and interesting handicrafts at
home, as the German peasantry do?'

'Who'll teach 'em, sir? From the plough-tail to the reaping-hook,
and back again, is all they know. Besides, sir, they are not like
us Cornish; they are a stupid pigheaded generation at the best,
these south countrymen. They're grown-up babies who want the parson
and the squire to be leading them, and preaching to them, and
spurring them on, and coaxing them up, every moment. And as for
scholarship, sir, a boy leaves school at nine or ten to follow the
horses; and between that time and his wedding-day he forgets every
word he ever learnt, and becomes, for the most part, as thorough a
heathen savage at heart as those wild Indians in the Brazils used to
be.'

'And then we call them civilised Englishmen!' said Lancelot. 'We
can see that your Indian is a savage, because he wears skins and
feathers; but your Irish cottar or your English labourer, because he
happens to wear a coat and trousers, is to be considered a civilised
man.'

'It's the way of the world, sir,' said Tregarva, 'judging carnal
judgment, according to the sight of its own eyes; always looking at
the outsides of things and men, sir, and never much deeper. But as
for reading, sir, it's all very well for me, who have been a keeper
and dawdled about like a gentleman with a gun over my arm; but did
you ever do a good day's farm-work in your life? If you had, man or
boy, you wouldn't have been game for much reading when you got home;
you'd do just what these poor fellows do,--tumble into bed at eight
o'clock, hardly waiting to take your clothes off, knowing that you
must turn up again at five o'clock the next morning to get a
breakfast of bread, and, perhaps, a dab of the squire's dripping,
and then back to work again; and so on, day after day, sir, week
after week, year after year, without a hope or a chance of being
anything but what you are, and only too thankful if you can get work
to break your back, and catch the rheumatism over.'

'But do you mean to say that their labour is so severe and
incessant?'

'It's only God's blessing if it is incessant, sir, for if it stops,
they starve, or go to the house to be worse fed than the thieves in
gaol. And as for its being severe, there's many a boy, as their
mothers will tell you, comes home night after night, too