feel that their landlord is living out of their labour. The agreements are
just; there is no rapacity. Very likely the original lease or arrangement
has expired half a century since; but no one troubles to renew it. It is
well understood that no change will be effected. The tenure is as steady
as if the tenant had an Act of Parliament at his back.

When men have once settled, they and their descendants remain, generation
after generation. By degrees their sons and sons' descendants settle too,
and the same name occurs perhaps in a dozen adjacent places. It is this
fixed unchangeable character of the district which has enabled the mass of
the tenants not indeed to become wealthy, but to acquire a solid,
substantial standing. In farming affairs money can be got together only in
the slow passage of years; experience has proved that beyond a doubt.
These people have been stationary for a length of time, and the moss of
the proverb has grown around them. They walk sturdily, and look all men in
the face; their fathers put money in the purse. Times are hard here as
everywhere, but if they cannot, for the present season, put more in that
purse, its contents are not, at all events, much diminished, and enable
them to maintain the same straightforward manliness and independence.
By-and-by, they know there will come the chink of the coin again.

When the tenant is stationary, the labourer is also. He stays in the same
cottage on the same farm all his life, his descendants remain and work for
the same tenant family. He can trace his descent in the locality for a
hundred years. From time immemorial both Hodge and his immediate employers
have looked towards Fleeceborough as their capital. Hodge goes in to the
market in charge of his master's sheep, his wife trudges in for household
necessaries. All the hamlet goes in to the annual fairs. Every cottager in
the hamlet knows somebody in the town; the girls go there to service, the
boys to get employment. The little village shops obtain their goods from