Towards the evening a gentleman and lady, the first middle-aged, the latter very young—­father and daughter—­approach, their horses seeming to linger as they walk through the shallow stream, and the cool water splashes above their fetlocks.  The shooting season is near at hand, Parliament has risen, and the landlords have returned home.  Instead of the Row, papa must take his darling a ride through the lanes, a little dusty as the autumn comes on, and pauses to read the notice on the wall.  It is his neighbour’s tenant, not his, but it comes home to him here.  It is the real thing—­the fact—­not the mere seeing it in the papers, or the warning hints in the letters of his own steward.  ‘Papa,’ is rather quiet for the rest of the ride.  Ever since he was a lad—­how many years ago is that?—­he has shot with his neighbour’s party over this farm, and recollects the tenant well, and with that friendly feeling that grows up towards what we see year after year.  In a day or two the clergyman drives by with his low four-wheel and fat pony, notes the poster as the pony slackens at the descent to the water, and tells himself to remember and get the tithe.  Some few Sundays, and Farmer Smith will appear in church no more.

Farmer Smith this beautiful morning is looking at the wheat, which is, and is not, his.  It would have been cut in an ordinary season, but the rains have delayed the ripening.  He wonders how the crop ever came up at all through the mass of weeds that choked it, the spurrey that filled the spaces between the stalks below, the bindweed that climbed up them, the wild camomile flowering and flourishing at the edge, the tall thistles lifting their heads above it in bunches, and the great docks whose red seeds showed at a distance.  He sent in some men, as much to give them something to do as for any real good, one day, who in a few hours pulled up enough docks to fill a cart.  They came across a number of snakes, and decapitated the reptiles with their hoes, and afterwards hung them all up—­tied together by the tail—­to a bough.  The bunch of headless snakes hangs there still, swinging to and fro as the wind plays through the oak.  Vermin, too, revel in weeds, which encourage the mice and rats, and are, perhaps, quite as much a cause of their increase as any acts of the gamekeeper.

Farmer Smith a few years since was very anxious for the renewal of his lease, just as those about to enter on tenancies desired leases above everything.  All the agricultural world agreed that a lease was the best thing possible—­the clubs discussed it, the papers preached it.  It was a safeguard; it allowed the tenant to develop his energies, and to put his capital into the soil without fear.  He had no dread of being turned out before he could get it back.  Nothing like a lease—­the certain preventative of all agricultural ills.  There was, to appearance, a great deal of truth in these arguments, which in their day made much impression, and caused a movement in that direction.  Who could foresee that in a few short years men would be eager to get rid of their leases on any terms?  Yet such was the fact.  The very men who had longed so eagerly for the blessing of security of tenure found it the worst thing possible for their interest.