first George. Turner painted the railway train and made it at once ideal,
poetical, and classical. His 'Rain, Steam, and Speed,' which displays a
modern subject, is a most wonderful picture. If a man chose his hour
rightly, the steam-plough under certain atmospheric conditions would give
him as good a subject as a Great Western train. He who has got the sense
of beauty in his eye can find it in things as they really are, and needs
no stagey time of artificial pastorals to furnish him with a sham nature.
Idealise to the full, but idealise the real, else the picture is a sham.

All the old things remain on the farm, but the village is driven out--the
village that used to come as one man to the reaping. Machinery has not
altered the earth, but it has altered the conditions of men's lives, and
as work decreases, so men decrease. Some go the cities, some emigrate;
the young men drift away, and there is none of that home life that there
used to be. They are going to try to re-settle our land by altering the
laws. Most certainly the laws ought to be altered, and must be altered,
still it is evident to any one of dispassionate thought, while such
immense quantities of gold are sent away from us, profit cannot be made
in farming either small or great. The crop is the same in either case,
and if there is no sale for the produce, it matters very little whether
you farm four acres or four hundred.

New hats and jackets, but the same old faces. A stout old farmer sat at
the side of his barn door on the hatch leaning against the post. His body
was as rotund as a full sack of wheat, his great chin and his great
checks were full; a man very solidly set as it were, and he eyed me, a
stranger, as I passed down the lane, with mistrust and suspicion in every
line of his face. Out of the hunting season a stranger might perhaps have
been seen there once in six months, and this was that once. The British
bull-dog growled in his countenance--very likely pleasantness itself to