In The Villages Cottagers Have No Ideas Of Tastefully Disposing Their Mantles About Their Shoulders, Or Of Dressing For The Occasion.

I do not know how to describe the form of a middle-aged cottage woman on a stormy day

With a large, greenish umbrella, a round bonnet, huge and enclosing all the head, back, and sides, like the vast helm of the knights, a sort of circular cloak, stout ankles well visible, and sometimes pattens; the wearer inside all this decidedly bulky, and the whole apparatus coming along through mud and rain with great deliberation. Inside the round bonnet a ruddy, apple-checked face, just such a one as used to go to mass in Sir John the priest's time, before the images were knocked out of the rood-loft at the church there. The boys and girls play in the ditches till they go to school, and they play in the hedges and ditches every hour they can get out of school, and the moment their time is up they go to work among the hedges and ditches, and though they may have had to read standard authors at school, no sooner do they get among the furrows than they talk hedge and ditch language. They do not talk Pope, or Milton, or Addison; they 'knaaws,' 'they be a-gwoin thur,' it's a 'geat,' and a 'vield,' and a 'vurrow.' These are the old faces you see, the same old powers are at work to fashion them. Heavy, blind blows of the Wind, the Rain, Frost, and Heat, have beaten up their faces in rude - repousse - work. They have nails in their boots, but new hats on their heads; he who paints them aright should paint the old nailed boots, but also the new hats and the Waltham watches. Why do they not read? All have been taught, and curious as the inconsistency may seem, they all value the privilege of being - able - to read and write, and yet they do not exercise it, except in a casual, random way. I for one, when the public schools began all through the rural districts, thought that at last the printing-press was going to reach the country people. In a measure it has done so, but in a flickering, uncertain manner; they read odd bits which come drifting to their homes in irregular ways, just as people on the coast light their fires with fragments of wreck, chance-thrown by the stormy spring-tides on the beach. So the fire of the mind in country places is fed with chips and splinters, and shapeless pieces that do not fit together, and no one sits down to read. I think I see two reasons why country people do not read, the first of which, thanks be to Allah, will endure for ever; the second may perhaps disappear in time, when those who make books come to see what is wanted.

First, nature has given them so much to read out of doors, such a vast and ever-changing picture-book, that white paper stained with black type indoors seems dry and without meaning.

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