Amongst so many drawbacks to the new thrift, one good thing that it has brought to the villagers, in the shape of a little leisure, gives us the means of seeing in more detail how destitute of interests their life has become. It must be owned that the leisure is very scanty. It is so obscured, too, by the people's habit of putting themselves to productive work in it that I have sometimes doubted if any benefit of the kind actually filtered down into their overburdened lives. Others, however, with a more business-like interest in the matter than mine, have recognized that a new thing has come into the country labourer's life, although they do not speak of it as "leisure." Mere wasted time is what it looks like to them. Thus, not long ago, an acquaintance who by no means shares my views of these matters was deploring to me the degenerate state, as he conceived it, of the labourers on certain farms in which he is interested, a few miles away from this valley. The men, he said, holding their cottages as one of the conditions of employment on the farms, had grown idle, and were neglecting the cottage gardens—were neglecting them so seriously that, in the interests of the estate, he had been obliged to complain to the farmers. Upon my asking for explanations of a disposition so unlike that of the labourers in this parish, many of whom are not content with their cottage gardens, but take more ground when they can get it, my friend said deliberately: "I think food is too cheap. With their fifteen shillings a week the men can buy all they want without working for it; and the result is that they waste their evenings and the gardens go to ruin."

With this remarkable explanation I am glad to think that I have nothing to do here. The point is that, according to a business man with lifelong experience in rural matters, country labourers now have time at their disposal. Without further question we may accept it as true; the cheapening of produce has made it just possible for labouring men to live without occupying every available hour in productive work, and in this one respect they do profit a little by those innovations—the use of machinery, the division of labour, and the free importation of foreign goods—which have replaced the antiquated peasant economy. It is not necessary nowadays—not absolutely necessary—for the labourer, when his day's wage-earning is done, to fall to work again in the evening in order to produce commodities for his own use. Doubtless if he does so he is the better off; but if he fails to do so he may still live. While he has been earning money away from home during the day, other men he has never met, in countries he has never seen, have been providing for him the things that he will want at home in the evening; and if these things have not been actually brought to his door, they are waiting for him in shops, whence he may get them in exchange for the money he has earned. Some of them, too, are of a quality such as, with the utmost skill and industry, he never could have produced for himself. Modern artificial light provides an example. Those home-made rushlights eulogized by Gilbert White and by Cobbett may have been well enough in their way, but cheap lamps and cheap paraffin have given the villagers their winter evenings. At a cost of a few halfpence earned in the course of the day's work a cottage family may prolong their winter day as far into the night as they please; and that, without feeling that they are wasting their store of light, and without being under necessity of spending the rescued hours at any of those thrifty tasks which alone would have justified peasant folk in sitting up late. They have the evening to use at their pleasure.

If it is said, as my friend interested in land seemed to suggest, that they do not know how to use it, I am not concerned to disagree. In fact, that is my own text. On an evening last winter, having occasion to ask a neighbour to do me a service, I knocked at his cottage door, and was invited in. The unshaded lamp on the table cast a hard, strong light on the appointments of the room, and in its glare the family—namely, the man, with his wife, his mother, and his sister—were sitting round the fire. On the table, which had no cloth, the remains of his hot tea-supper were not cleared away—the crust of a loaf, a piece of bacon-rind on a plate, and a teacup showed what it had been. But now he had finished, and was resting in his shirt-sleeves, nursing his baby. In fact, the evening's occupation had begun. The family, that is to say, had two or three hours to spend—for it was but little past seven o'clock—and nothing to do but to sit there and gossip. An innocent pastime that; I have no fault to find with it, excepting that it had the appearance of being very dull. The people looked comfortable, but there was no liveliness in them. No trace of vivacity in their faces gave the smallest reason to suppose that my coming had interrupted any enjoyment of the evening. A listless contentment in being at home together, with the day's work done and a fire to sit by, was what was suggested by the whole bearing of the family. Their leisure was of no use to them for recreation—for "making themselves anew," that is—or for giving play to faculties which had lain quiet during the day's work. At the time, however, I saw nothing significant in all this. It was just what other cottage interiors had revealed to me on other winter evenings. The surprising, the unexpected thing would have been to find the little spell of leisure being joyfully used.

Shall we leave the matter there then? If we do, we shall overlook the one feature in the situation that most particularly deserves attention. For suppose that the cottagers in general do not know what to do with their leisure, yet we must not argue that therefore they do not prize it. Dull though they may seem in it, tedious though I believe they often find it, nevertheless there proceeds from it a subtle satisfaction, as at something gained, in the liberty to behave as they like, in the vague sense that for an hour or two no further effort is demanded of them. Yawning for bed, half sick of the evening, somewhere in the back of their consciousness they feel that this respite from labour, which they have won by the day's work, is a privilege not to be thrown away. It is more to them than a mere cessation from toil, a mere interval between more important hours; it is itself the most important part of the day—the part to which all the rest has led up.

Nothing of the sort, I believe, was experienced in the village in earlier times. Leisure, and the problem of using it, are new things there. I do not mean that the older inhabitants of the valley never had any spare time. There were, doubtless, many hours when they "eased off," to smoke their pipes and drink their beer and be jolly; only, such hours were, so to speak, a by-product of living, not the usual and expected consummation of every day. Accepting them by no means unwillingly when they occurred, the folk still were wont normally to reduce them to a minimum, or at least to see that they did not occur too often; as if spare time, after all, was only a time of waiting until work could be conveniently resumed. So lightly was it valued that most villagers cut it short by the simple expedient of going to bed at six or seven o'clock. But then, in their peasant way, they enjoyed interesting days. The work they did, although it left their reasoning and imaginative powers undeveloped, called into play enough subtle knowledge and skill to make their whole day's industry gratifying. What should they want of leisure? They wanted rest, in which to recover strength for taking up again the interesting business of living; but they approached their daily life—their pig-keeping and bread-making, their mowing and thatching and turf-cutting and gardening, and the whole round of country tasks—almost in a welcoming spirit, matching themselves against its demands and proving their manhood by their success. But the modern labourer's employment, reduced as it is to so much greater monotony, and carried on for a master instead of for the man himself, is seldom to be approached in that spirit. The money-valuation of it is the prime consideration; it is a commercial affair; a clerk going to his office has as much reason as the labourer to welcome the morning's call to work. As in the clerk's case, so in the labourer's: the act or fruition of living is postponed during the hours in which the living is being earned; between the two processes a sharp line of division is drawn; and it is not until the clock strikes, and the leisure begins, that a man may remember that he is a man, and try to make a success of living. Hence the truth of what I say: the problem of using leisure is a new one in the village. Deprived, by the economic changes which have gone over them, of any keen enjoyment of life while at work, the labourers must make up for the deprivation when work is over, or not at all. Naturally enough, in the absence of any traditions to guide them, they fail. But self-respect forbids the old solution. To feed and go to bed would be to shirk the problem, not to solve it.

So much turns upon a proper appreciation of these truths that it will be well to illustrate them from real life, contrasting the old against the new. Fortunately the means are available. Modernized people acquainted with leisure are in every cottage, while as for the others, the valley still contains a few elderly men whose lives are reminiscent of the earlier day. Accordingly I shall finish this chapter by giving an account of one of these latter, so that in the next chapter the different position of the present-day labourers may be more exactly understood.

The man I have in mind—I will rename him Turner—belongs to one of the old families of the village, and inherited from his father a cottage and an acre or so of ground—probably mortgaged—together with a horse and cart, a donkey, a cow or two, a few pigs, and a fair stock of the usual rustic tools and implements. Unluckily for him, he inherited no traditions—there were none in his family—to teach him how to use these possessions for making a money profit; so that, trying to go on in the old way, as if the world were not changing all round him, he muddled away his chances, and by the time that he was fifty had no property left that was worth any creditor's notice. The loss, however, came too late to have much effect on his habits. And now that he is but the weekly tenant of a tiny cottage, and owns no more than a donkey and cart and a few rabbits and fowls, he is just the same sort of man that he used to be in prosperity—thriftless from our point of view, but from the peasant point of view thrifty enough, good-tempered too, generous to a fault, indifferent to discomforts, as a rule very hard-working, yet apparently quite unacquainted with fatigue.

He gets his living now as a labourer; but, unlike his neighbours, he seems by no means careful to secure constant employment. The regularity of it would hardly suit his temper; he is too keenly desirous of being his own master. And his own master he manages to be, in a certain degree. From those who employ him he obtains some latitude of choice, not alone as to the hours of the day when he shall serve them, but even as to the days of the week. I have heard him protest: "Monday you says for me to come. Well, I dunno about Monday—if Tuesday'd suit ye as well? I wants to do so-and-so o' Monday, if 'tis fine. You see, there's Mr. S—— I bin so busy I en't bin anear him this week for fear he should want me up there. I knows his grass wants cuttin'. But I 'xpects I shall ha' to satisfy 'n Monday, or else p'raps he won't like it." Sometimes he takes a day for his own affairs, carting home hop-bine in his donkey-cart, or getting heath for some thatching job that has been offered to him. On these terms, while he finds plenty to do in working intermittently for four or five people in the parish, he preserves a freedom of action which probably no other labourer in the village enjoys. Few others could command it. But Turner's manner is so ingratiating that people have a personal liking for him, and it is certain that his strength and all-round handiness make of him an extremely useful man. Especially does his versatility commend him. Others in the village are as strong as he and as active and willing, but there are not now many others who can do such a number of different kinds of work as he can, with so much experienced readiness.

Among his clients (for that is a more fitting word for them than "employers") there are two or three residents with villa gardens, and also two of those "small-holders" who, more fortunate than himself (though not more happy, I fancy), have managed to cling to the little properties which their fathers owned. Turner, therefore, comes in for a number of jobs extraordinarily diverse. Thus, during last summer I knew him to be tending two gardens, where his work ranged from lawn-cutting (sometimes with a scythe) to sowing seeds, taking care of the vegetable crops, and trimming hedges. But this occupied him only from seven in the morning until five in the afternoon. In the margin outside these hours—starting at five or earlier and keeping on until dark—he was helping the two small-holders, one after the other, to make their hay and get the ricks built. Then the ricks required thatching, and Turner thatched them. In the meantime he was getting together a little rick of his own for his donkey's use, carrying home in bags the longer grass which he had mowed in the rough places of people's gardens or had chopped off in hedgerows near his home. A month later he was harvesting for the small-holders, and again there was rick-thatching for him to do. "That's seven I've done," he remarked to me, on the day when he finished the last one. "But didn't the rain stop you this morning?" I asked, for rain had begun heavily about nine o'clock. He laughed. "No.... We got'n covered in somehow. Had to sramble about, but he was thatched afore the rain come."

Later still he was threshing some of this corn with a flail. I heard of it with astonishment. "A flail?" "Yes," he said; "my old dad put me to it when I was seventeen, so I had to learn." He seemed to think little of it. But to me threshing by hand was so obsolete and antiquated a thing as to be a novelty; nor yet to me only, for a friend to whom I mentioned the matter laughed, and asked if I had come across any knights in armour lately.

One autumn, when he was doing some work for myself, he begged for a day or two away in order to take a job at turf-cutting. When he returned on the third or fourth day, he said: "Me and my nipper" (a lad of about sixteen years old) "cut sixteen hundred this time." Now, lawn-turfs are cut to a standard size, three feet by one, wherefore I remarked: "Why, that's nearly a mile you have cut." "Oh, is it?" he said. "But it didn't take long. Ye see, I had the nipper to go along with the edgin' tool in front of me, and 'twan't much trouble to get 'em up."

He could not keep on for me regularly. The thought of Mr. S——'s work waiting to be done fidgeted him. "When I was up there last he was talkin' about fresh gravellin' all his paths. I said to'n, 'If I was you I should wait anyhow till the leaves is down—they'll make the new gravel so ontidy else.' So they would, sure. I keeps puttin' it off. But I shall ha' to go. I sold'n a little donkey in the summer, and he's hoofs'll want parin' again. I done 'em not so long ago...."

So his work varies, week after week. From one job to another up and down the valley he goes, not listlessly and fatigued, but taking a sober interest in all he does. You can see in him very well how his forefathers went about their affairs, for he is plainly a man after their pattern. His day's work is his day's pleasure. It is changeful enough, and calls for skill enough, to make it enjoyable to him. Furthermore, things on either side of it—things he learnt to understand long ago—make their old appeal to his senses as he goes about, although his actual work is not concerned with them. In the early summer—he had come to mow a little grass plot for me—I found him full of a boyish delight in birds and birds'-nests. A pair of interesting birds had arrived; at any time in the day they could be seen swooping down from the branch of a certain apple-tree and back again to their starting-place without having touched the ground. "Flycatchers!" said Turner exultantly. "I shall ha' to look about. They got their nest somewhere near, you may be sure o' that! A little wisp o' grass somewhere in the clunch (fork) of a tree ..." (his glance wandered speculatively round in search of a likely place) "that's where they builds. Ah! look now! There he goes again! Right in the clunch you'll find their nest, and as many as ten young 'uns in'n.... Yes, I shall be bound to find where he is afore I done with it."

The next day, hard by where he was at work, an exclamation of mine drew him to look at a half-fledged bird, still alive, lying at the foot of a nut-tree. "H'm: so 'tis. A young blackbird," he said pitifully. The next moment he had the bird in his hand. "Where can the nest be, then? Up in that nut? Well, to be sure! Wonders I hadn't seen that afore now. That's it though, 'pend upon it; right up in the clunch o' that bough." Before I could say a word he was half-way up amongst the branches, long-legged and struggling, to put the bird back into its nest.

As he has always lived in the valley, he is full of memories of it, and especially early memories; recalling the comparative scantiness of its population when he was a boy, and the great extent of the common; and the warm banks where hedgehogs abounded—hedgehogs which his father used to kill and cook; and the wells of good water, so few and precious that each had its local name. For instance, "Butcher's Well" (so-called to this day, he says) "was where Jack Butcher used to live, what was shepherd for Mr. Warner up there at Manley Bridge." At eight years old he was sent out on to the common to mind cows; at ten he was thought big enough to be helpful to his father, at piece-work in the hop-grounds; and in due time he began to go "down into Sussex" with his father and others for the harvesting. His very first experience there was of a wet August, when the men could earn no money and were reduced to living on bread and apples; but other years have left him with happier memories of that annual outing. "Old Sussex!" he laughed once in appreciative reminiscence—"Old Sussex! Them old hills! I did use to have a appetite there! I could eat anything.... You could go to the top of a hill and look down one way and p'raps not see more'n four or five places (houses or farmsteads), and look t'other way and mebbe not be able to see e'er a one at all. Oh, a reg'lar wild, out-o'-th'-way place 'twas." On this farm, to which his gang went year after year, the farmer "didn't pay very high—you couldn't expect'n to. But he used to treat us very well. Send out great puddin's for us two or three times a week, and cider, and bread-an'-cheese.... Nine rabbits old Fisher the roadman out here says 'twas, but I dunno 'bout that, but I knows 'twas as many as seven, the farmer put into one puddin' for us. There was a rabbit for each man, be how 'twill. In a great yaller basin...." Turner held out his arms to illustrate a large circumference.

In the time of his prosperity the main of his work was with his own horse and cart, so that I know him to have had considerable experience in that way; and I recollect, too, his being at plough in one of the slanting gardens of this valley, not with his horse—the ground was too steep for that—but with two donkeys harnessed to a small plough which he kept especially for such work. Truly it would be hard to "put him out," hard to find him at a loss, in anything connected with country industry. He spoilt some sea-kale for me once, admitting, however, before he began that he was not very familiar with its management; but that is the only matter of its kind in which I have proved him inefficient. To see him putting young cabbage-plants in rows is to realize what a fine thing it is to know the best way of going to work, even at such a simple-seeming task as that; and I would not undertake to count in how many such things he is proficient.

One day he was telling me an anecdote of his taking honey from an old-fashioned straw beehive; another day the talk was of pruning fruit-trees. I had shown him an apple—the first one to be picked from a young tree—and he at once named it correctly as a "Blenheim Orange," recognizing it by its "eye," whereupon I asked a question or two, and, finally, if he understood pruning. There came his customary laugh, while his eyes twinkled, as if the question amused him, as if I might have known that he understood pruning. "Yes, I've done it many's a time. Grape vines, too." Who taught him? "Oh, 'twas my old uncle made me do that. He was laid up one time—'twas when I was eighteen year old—and he says to me: 'You'll ha' to do it. Now's your time to learn....' Of course he showed me how. So 'twas he as showed me how to thatch.... My father never knowed how to do thatchin', nor anythink else much. He was mostly hop-ground. He done a little mowin', of course." Equally of course, the father had reaped and harvested, and kept pigs and cows, and a few odd things besides; nevertheless, being chiefly a wage-earner, "he never knowed much," and it was to the uncle that the lad owed his best training.

From talk of the uncle, and of the uncle's cows, of which he had charge for a time, he drifted off to mention a curious piece of old thrift connected with the common, and practised apparently for some time after the enclosure. There was a man he knew in those now remote days who fed his cows for a part of the year on furze, or "fuzz," as we call it here. Two acres of furze he had, which he cut close in alternate years, the second year's growth making a fine juicy fodder when chopped small into a sort of chaff. An old hand-apparatus for that purpose—a kind of chaff-cutting box—was described to me. The same man had a horse, which also did well on furze diet mixed with a little malt from the man's own beer-brewing.

To the lore derived from his uncle and others, Turner has added much by his own observation—not, of course, intentional observation scientifically verified, but that shrewd and practical folk-observation, if I may so call it, by which in the course of generations the rural English had already garnered such a store of mingled knowledge and error. So he knows, or thinks he knows, why certain late-bearing apple-trees have fruit only every other year, and what effect on the potato crop is caused by dressing our sandy soil with chalk or lime; so he watches the new mole-runs, or puzzles to make out what birds they can be that peck the ripening peas out of the pods, or estimates the yield of oats to the acre by counting the sheaves that he stacks, or examines the lawn to see what kinds of grass are thriving. About all such matters his talk is the talk of an experienced man habitually interested in his subject, and yet it is never obtrusive. The remarks fall from him casually; you feel, too, that while he is telling you something that he noticed yesterday or years ago his eyes are alert to seize any new detail that may seem worthy of attention. Details are always really his subject, for the generalizations he sometimes offers are built on the flimsiest foundation of but one or two observed facts. But I am not now concerned with the value of his observations for themselves; the point is that to him they are so interesting. He is a man who seems to enjoy his life with an undiminished zest from morning to night. It is doubtful if the working hours afford, to nine out of ten modern and even "educated" men, such a constant refreshment of acceptable incidents as Turner's hours bring to him.

He is perhaps the best specimen of the old stock now left in the valley; but it must not be thought that he is singular. Others there are not very unlike him; and all that one hears of them goes to prove that the old cottage thrift, whatever its limitations may have been, did at least make the day's work interesting enough to a man, without his needing to care about leisure evenings. Turner, for his part, does not value them at all. In the winter he is often in bed before seven o'clock.