Surely all other leisure is hurry compared with a sunny walk through the fields from “afternoon church”—­as such walks used to be in those old leisurely times when the boat, gliding sleepily along the canal, was the newest locomotive wonder; when Sunday books had most of them old brown leather covers, and opened with a remarkable precision always in one place.  Leisure is gone—­gone where the spinning-wheels are gone, and the pack-horses and the slow wagons and the pedlers who brought bargains to the door on sunny afternoons.  Ingenious philosophers tell you, perhaps, that the great work of the steam-engine is to create leisure for mankind.  Do not believe them; it only creates a vacuum for eager thought to rush in.  Even idleness is eager now—­eager for amusement; prone to excursion trains, art museums, periodical literature and exciting novels; prone even to scientific theorizing and cursory peeps through microscopes.  Old Leisure was quite a different personage; he only read one newspaper, innocent of leaders, and was free from that “periodicity of sensations which we call post-time.  He was a contemplative, rather stout gentleman, of excellent digestion—­of quiet perceptions, undiseased by hypothesis, happy in his inability to know the causes of things, preferring the things themselves.  He lived chiefly in the country, among pleasant seats and homesteads, and was fond of sauntering by the fruit-tree wall, and scenting the apricots when they were warmed by the morning sunshine, or of sheltering himself under the orchard boughs at noon when the summer pears were falling.  He knew nothing of week-day services, and thought none the worse of the Sunday sermon if it allowed him to sleep from the text to the blessing—­liking the afternoon service best, because the prayers were the shortest, and not ashamed to say so; for he had an easy, jolly conscience, broad-backed like himself, and able to carry a great deal of beer or port wine—­not being made squeamish by doubts and qualms and lofty aspirations.  Life was not a task to him, but a sinecure; he fingered the guineas in his pocket, and ate his dinners and slept the sleep of the irresponsible; for had he not kept up his charter by going to church on the Sunday afternoon?  Fine old Leisure!  Do not be severe upon him and judge him by our modern standard; he never went to Exeter Hall, or heard a popular preacher, or read Tracts for the Times or Sartor Resartus.” [Footnote:  Adam Bede, chapter LII.]

Her faithfulness to the life she describes is seen in her skilful use of dialect.  The sense of local coloring is greatly heightened by the dialogues which speak the language of the people portrayed.  When Luke describes his rabbits as nesh things, and Mrs. Jerome says little gells should be seen and not heard, and Tommy Trounsom mentions his readiness to pick up a chanch penny, we are brought closer to the homely life of these people.  She has so well succeeded, in Mr. Carson’s words, in portraying “what they call the dileck as is spoke hereabout,” the reader is enabled to realize, as he could not so well do by any other method, the homeliness and rusticity of the life presented.