njy, dog-tired
and surfeited with pleasure, as the evening comes on and the dancing
begins in the booths; and though Willum and Rachel in her new ribbons
and many another good lad and lass don't come away just yet, but have a
good step out, and enjoy it, and get no harm thereby, yet we, being
sober folk, will just stroll away up through the churchyard, and by the
old yew-tree; and get a quiet dish of tea and a parle with our gossips,
as the steady ones of our village do, and so to bed.

That's the fair true sketch, as far as it goes, of one of the larger
village feasts in the Vale of Berks, when I was a little boy. They are
much altered for the worse, I am told. I haven't been at one these
twenty years, but I have been at the statute fairs in some west-country
towns, where servants are hired, and greater abominations cannot be
found. What village feasts have come to, I fear, in many cases, may be
read in the pages of Yeast, (though I never saw one so bad--thank God!)

Do you want to know why? It is because, as I said before, gentlefolk and
farmers have left off joining or taking an interest in them. They don't
either subscribe to the prizes, or go down and enjoy the fun.

Is this a good or a bad sign? I hardly know. Bad, sure enough, if it
only arises from the further separation of classes consequent on twenty
years of buying cheap and selling dear, and its accompanying over-work;
or because our sons and daughters have their hearts in London Club-life,
or so-called Society, instead of in the old English home duties; because
farmers' sons are apeing fine gentlemen, and farmers' daughters caring
more to make bad foreign music than good English cheeses. Good, perhaps,
if it be that the time for the old "veast" has gone by, that it is no
longer the healthy sound expression of English country holiday-making;
that, in fact, we as a nation have got beyond it, and are in a
transition state, feeling for and soon likely to find some better
substitute.

Only I have just got this to say before I quit the text. Don't let
reformers of any sort think that they are going really to lay hold of
the working boys and young men of England by any educational grapnel
whatever, which hasn't some _bona fide_ equivalent for the games of the
old country "veast" in it; something to put in the place of the
back-swording and wrestling and racing; something to try the muscles of
men's bodies, and the endurance of their hearts, and to make them
re