twice in their lives, visit certain market towns in their district at
intervals, and escape back into the country with the joy of wild birds
liberated from a cage. The mere grime and dirt of cities horrified
them; they were suffocated in the close air, and they were driven half
distracted by the clamour of the streets. These men lived, upon the
whole, lives of not immoderate labour: or, as one might say, of sober
ease, They possessed little money, it is true, but the want of it did
not appear to trouble them. Their houses were plain, their method of
life simple, and clearly it had not entered their minds to covet any
more sumptuous modes of life. All this is changed now. The daily
press, which presents a thousand pictures of the bustling life of
cities, goes everywhere, and has communicated a strange restlessness to
the rural mind. Increased means of locomotion have brought London to
the very door of village communities. If men to-day actually possessed
the acres on which they toil they would be in no hurry to leave them;
they would be effectually chained to the soil by the sense of
independence and proprietorship, as is the case among the rural
population of France, who do not rent but own the land. The yeomen did
own the land, and that was the secret of their content. But when the
day of large farms came, the small landowners were crushed out; and as
for the mere peasant, he has no chance at all of ever owning land, and
never has had; so that he has every inducement to crowd into towns
where wages are nominally higher, and he soon outgrows that natural
earth-hunger which modern civilisation affords him no means of
gratifying.

By virtue of the peasant or gipsy blood in me I kept my earth-hunger
through twenty years of London life, but I count my case unique. I
never found any one who shared my feelings; on the contrary, I found
that whatever primitive instincts toward country life my friends may