village or small country town, but that people in such places had
even forgotten how to bake bread, and that at Wallingford, for
instance, the bread came down with the newspapers by an early train
from London, worked in some way, the explanation of which I could not
understand. He told us also that the townspeople who came into the
country used to pick up the agricultural arts by carefully watching
the way in which the machines worked, gathering an idea of handicraft
from machinery; because at that time almost everything in and about
the fields was done by elaborate machines used quite unintelligently
by the labourers. On the other hand, the old men amongst the
labourers managed to teach the younger ones gradually a little
artizanship, such as the use of the saw and the plane, the work of
the smithy, and so forth; for once more, by that time it was as much
as--or rather, more than--a man could do to fix an ash pole to a rake
by handiwork; so that it would take a machine worth a thousand
pounds, a group of workmen, and half a day's travelling, to do five
shillings' worth of work. He showed us, among other things, an
account of a certain village council who were working hard at all
this business; and the record of their intense earnestness in getting
to the bottom of some matter which in time past would have been
thought quite trivial, as, for example, the due proportions of alkali
and oil for soap-making for the village wash, or the exact heat of
the water into which a leg of mutton should be plunged for boiling--
all this joined to the utter absence of anything like party feeling,
which even in a village assembly would certainly have made its
appearance in an earlier epoch, was very amusing, and at the same
time instructive.

This old man, whose name was Henry Morsom, took us, after our meal
and a rest, into a biggish hall which contained a large collection of