CHAPTER II



LEAVING HIS FARM


A large white poster, fresh and glaring, is pasted on the wall of a barn
that stands beside a narrow country lane. So plain an advertisement,
without any colour or attempt at 'display,' would be passed unnoticed
among the endless devices on a town hoarding. There nothing can be hoped
to be looked at unless novel and strange, or even incomprehensible. But
here the oblong piece of black and white contrasts sufficiently in itself
with red brick and dull brown wooden framing, with tall shadowy elms, and
the glint of sunshine on the streamlet that flows with a ceaseless murmur
across the hollow of the lane. Every man that comes along stays to read
it.

The dealer in his trap--his name painted in white letters on the
shaft--pulls up his quick pony, and sits askew on his seat to read. He has
probably seen it before in the bar of the wayside inn, roughly hung on a
nail, and swaying to and fro with the draught along the passage. He may
have seen it, too, on the handing-post at the lonely cross-roads, stuck on
in such a manner that, in order to peruse it, it is necessary to walk
round the post. The same formal announcement appears also in the local
weekly papers--there are at least two now in the smallest place--and he
has read it there. Yet he pauses to glance at it again, for the country
mind requires reiteration before it can thoroughly grasp and realise the
simplest fact. The poster must be read and re-read, and the printer's name
observed and commented on, or, if handled, the thickness of the paper felt