I think it’s the evenings, when I’m held a prisoner in the city, mak’ me lang maist for the country.  There’s a joy to a country evening.  Whiles it’s winter.  But within it’s snug.  There’s the wind howling doon the chimney, but there’s the fire blazing upon the hearth, and the kettle singing it’s bit sang on the hob.  And all the family will be in frae work, tired but happy.  Some one wull start a sang to rival the kettle; we’ve a poet in Scotland.  ’Twas the way ma mither wad sing the sangs o’ Bobby Burns made me sure, when I was a bit laddie, that I must, if God was gude tae me, do what I could to carry on the work o’ that great poet.

There’s plenty o’ folk who like the country for rest and recreation.  But they canna understand hoo it comes that folk are willing to stay there all their days and do the “dull country work.”  Aye, but it’s no sae dull, that work in the country.  There’s less monotony in it, in ma een, than in the life o’ the clerk or the shopkeeper, doing the same thing, day after day, year after year.  I’ the country they’re producing—­they’re making food and ither things yon city dweller maun ha’.

It’s the land, when a’s said a’s done, that feeds us and sustains us; clothes us and keeps us.  It’s the countryman, wi’ his plough, to whom the city liver owes his food.  We in Britain had a sair lesson in the war.  Were the Germans no near bein’ able to starve us oot and win the war wi’ their submarines, And shouldna Britain ha’ been able, as she was once, to feed hersel’ frae her ain soil?

I’m thinking often, in these days, of hoo the soldiers must be feeling who are back frae France and the years i’ the trenches.  They’ve lived great lives, those o’ them that ha’ lived through it.  Do ye think they’ll be ready tae gang back to what they were before they dropped their pens or their tape measures and went to war to save the country?

I hae ma doots o’ that.  There’s some wull go back, and gladly—­them that had gude posts before the fichtin’ came.  But I’m wondering about the clerks that sat, stooped on their high stools, and balanced books.  Wull a man be content to write doon, o’er and o’er again, “To one pair shoes, eighteen and sixpence, to five yards cotton print——­” Oh, ye ken the sort o’ thing I mean.  Wull he do that, who’s been out there, facin’ death, clear eyed, hearing the whistle o’ shell o’er his head, seeing his friends dee before his een?

I hault nothing against the man who’s a clerk or a man in a linen draper’s shop.  It’s usefu’, honest work they do.  But it’s no the sort of work I’m thinking laddies like those who’ve fought the Hun and won the war for Britain and humanity wull be keen tae be doing in the future.

The toon, as it is, lives frae hand to mooth on the work the country does.  Man canna live, after a’, on ledgers and accounts.  Much o’ the work that’s done i’ the city’s just the outgrowth o’ what the country produces.  And the trouble wi’ Britain is that sae many o’ her sons ha’ flocked tae the cities and the toons that the country’s deserted.  Villages stand empty.  Farms are abandoned—­or bought by rich men who make park lands and lawns o’ the fields where the potato and the mangel wurzel, the corn and the barley, grew yesteryear.