OLD CUSTOMS miles per hour, and our journey would not have been finished by Christmas time. To the artist eye, accustomed to look out for beauty, rural England is one succession of pictures!
We now struck upon a purely farming country, where the fields were large and divided by hedgerows into a sort of glorified and many-tinted chess-*board—not a happy comparison certainly, but "'twill serve." In some of the fields we saw gleaners, women and children, at work amongst the stubble,—I had nearly written at play, so unlike work did their occupation seem, for the children were romping, and the women were laughing and chatting, and it did our hearts good to hear the merry prattle and cheerful voices. Would all labour were as lightsome!
We had an idea that the gleaner, like the almost forgotten flail, was a thing of the past, but were delighted to find that the good old custom, honoured by over two thousand years of observance, sung of by poets and beloved by painters, has not wholly disappeared, and that some of the romance of the fields is left to us. The flail, that used to knock out the corn on the old barn floors with much thumping, I have not met with for years long past, but I believe, from what I hear, that it still is used in a few remote places. The reaping machine has driven the slow sickle into a few odd corners of the land, where the ground is rough and the crops are small, though sometimes it has momentarily reappeared elsewhere when the corn has been badly laid. The mowing machine also has to a great
