member rightly—and saw a good deal of our workaday doings; and at the end he broke out into this lamentable cry: “Oh! you live so bad, you do live so bad!” It was not our material existence, nor, happily, our moral, that he intended thus to rebuke; it was the performance of our intellects and spirits. And, as I followed Nance into the orchard, his words came back to me, and I wondered whether, after all, he were not right; whether such as Nance and her family, toiling thus, year in, year out, were not actually, that the farm, forsooth, might prosper, being starved in brain and soul; whether, in fact, they could be said truly to live at all? Unlike the Old-World workers, we in this country have no burning wrongs to awake our energies and point us to ideals—or, at any rate, if we have, there are but few of us that have caught fire. Church and chapel, the immemorial “way-out” from mere existence to so many of our labouring forefathers, mean (whatever the reason; I do but state the fact) very little to our younger generation. Art comes at all times scantly to the back-blocks; and with what hope can Literature appeal to brains exhausted already by the exhaustion of the body? While, on the other hand, what have we in the place of these, to exercise our higher faculties, and so give us, in addition to material existence, life? Oh dear! despite our soil and our sunshine, our independence and our labour laws, don’t we some of us live really rather “bad”? In our ardour for “the land” are we not keeping our regard fixed rather too sedulously upon it? forgetting that the wide-winged air, the lofty sky, are also facts, and unconscious that man really cannot ever live by bread alone; no, not
