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Ben, the carter, coming home to the farm with his team, had dropped at the very threshold of the stable, blasted in a lurid furnace of sudden fire. A labourer's cottage had been wrecked; many a stately forest tree had been rent or blighted; the withering havoc had spread far and wide over the hills. On the following morning, the keeper, going his rounds, had found the dead hare beside a riven oak.
It is wonderful with what eager zeal many of the old-style farmers enter into the details of a labourer's life, and carefully ascertain his birth, his parentage, his marriage, his wife's parentage, and the very minutest matters. These facts thus accumulated are talked over in the boardroom when an applicant comes to the union for relief.
"I maintain, sir, that it is all a matter of education or training, and that you could make a gentleman's son a labourer, or a labourer's son a gentleman." "And are you going to put that in your book, doctor?" "Yes, sir, I am: for it is a fact. I'm sure I'm right." Sir James laughed. "And I'm sure you are wrong. Look at my boy, now.
Fourpence a-day was a labourer's wage, but what need had one of even fourpence, with his hut free and the food piling richly at his very door? On the 27th of July in this same year 1644 we saw his lordship and his clan march from Inneraora to the dreary north.
He rose to go about his work, muttering: "Wait till he sees it, when he gets caught, I bet he'll turn blue." Frank thought about his labourer's story during the whole of the afternoon. "These superstitions do a great deal of harm to these poor people," he said in a soliloquy. He therefore resolved to try and root out all these strange notions from Pierre's head. He soon felt a kind of ecstacy.
The horses smoked and the men laboured and shouted and drank in the sharp autumn morning; so that one had a strong effect of large, open-air existence. The fellow who drove me was something of a humourist; and his conversation was all in praise of an agricultural labourer's way of life.
Lord-chief-justice Hales, who wrote in the time of Charles II. computes the necessary expense of a labourer's family, consisting of six persons, the father and mother, two children able to do something, and two not able, at ten shillings a-week, or twenty-six pounds a-year. If they cannot earn this by their labour, they must make it up, he supposes, either by begging or stealing.
I ha' been by other deathbeds the Lord reward me for it, as 'tis ter be expected He will and I ha'n't never seed a Christian woman so sot agin goin' as yu are." The reluctant one shut her eyes wearily; the dropped lids trembled for a minute, then were raised upon the same hard face. "She don' look like a labourer's gal, Dora don't," she said faintly.
As he drove down a lane with his father towards the railway station, those long years ago, he had seen the girl's face looking at him from the window of a labourer's cottage at the crossroads; and its stupefied desolation haunted him for many years, even after the girl had married and gone to live in Scotland that place of torment for an Irish soul.
No resistance could check them; their reward would follow as visibly as it follows the labourer's toll, the nightingale's song, or the work of the bee. But we have learned at last that the moral world is a world wherein man is alone; a world contained in ourselves that bears no relation to matter, upon which its influence is only of the most exceptional and hazardous kind.
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