gateway he picks up a cast horse-shoe. With the rusty iron in his hand he
passes slowly down the lane, and, as he goes, the bitter wind drives the
fallen leaves that have been lying beside the way rustling and dancing
after him.

From a farmer occupying a good-sized farm he had descended to be a
farmer's bailiff in the same locality. But a few months since he was
himself a tenant, and now he is a bailiff at 15_s_. a week and a cottage.
There is nothing dramatic, nothing sensational, in the history of his
descent; but it is, perhaps, all the more full of bitter human
experiences. As a man going down a steep hill, after a long while finds
himself on the edge of a precipitous chalk pit, and topples in one fall to
the bottom, so, though the process of going downhill occupied so long, the
actual finish came almost suddenly. Thus it was that from being a master
he found himself a servant. He does not complain, nor appeal for pity. His
back is a little more bowed, he feels the cold a little more, his step is
yet more spiritless. But all he says about it is that 'Hard work never
made any money yet.'

He has worked exceedingly hard all his lifetime. In his youth, though the
family were then well-to-do, he was not permitted to lounge about in
idleness, but had to work with the rest in the fields. He dragged his
heavy nailed shoes over the furrows with the plough; he reaped and loaded
in harvest time; in winter he trimmed the hedgerows, split logs, and
looked after the cattle. He enjoyed no luxurious education--luxurious in
the sense of scientifically arranged dormitories, ample meals, and
vacations to be spent on horseback, or with the breechloader. Trudging to
and fro the neighbouring country town, in wind, and wet, and snow, to
school, his letters were thrashed into him. In holiday time he went to
work--his holidays, in fact, were so arranged as to fall at the time when