The only time he worked was in the height of the harvest, when high wages are paid.  But then his money went in drink, and drink often caused him to neglect the labour he had undertaken, at an important juncture when time was of consequence.  On one such occasion the employer lost his temper and gave him a piece of his mind, ending by a threat of proceedings for breach of contract.  A night or two afterwards the farmer’s rick-yard was ablaze, and a few months later the incendiary found himself commencing a term of penal servitude.  There he was obliged to work, began to walk upright, and acquired that peculiarly marked air of deference which at first contrasts rather pleasantly with the somewhat gruff address of most labourers.  During his absence the wife almost prospered, having plenty of employment and many kind friends.  He signalised his return by administering a thrashing—­just to re-assert his authority—­which, however, the poor woman received with equanimity, remarking that it was only his way.  He recommenced his lounging life, working occasionally when money was to be easily earned—­for the convict stain does not prevent a man getting agricultural employment—­and spending the money in liquor.  When tolerably sober he is, in a sense, harmless; if intoxicated, his companions give him the road to himself.

Now there is nothing exceptionally characteristic of the agricultural labourer in the career of such a man.  Members of other classes of the working community are often sent to penal servitude, and sometimes men of education and social position.  But it is characteristic of agricultural life that a man with the stigma of penal servitude can return and encounter no overpowering prejudice against him.  There are work and wages, for him if he likes to take them.  No one throws his former guilt in his face.  He may not be offered a place of confidence, nor be trusted with money, as the upper labourers—­carters for instance—­sometimes are.  But the means of subsistence are open to him, and he will not be driven by the memory of one crime to commit another.

There is no school of crime in the country.  Children are not brought up from the earliest age to beg and steal, to utter loquacious falsehood, or entrap the benevolent with sham suffering.  Hoary thieves do not keep academies for the instruction of little fingers in the art of theft.  The science of burglary is unstudied.  Though farmhouses are often situate in the most lonely places a case of burglary rarely occurs, and if it does, is still more rarely traced to a local resident.  In such houses there is sometimes a good deal of old silver plate, accumulated in the course of generations—­a fact that must be perfectly well known to the labouring class, through the women indoor-servants.  Yet such attempts are quite exceptional.  So, too, are robberies from the person with violence.  Serious crime is, indeed, comparatively scarce.  The cases that come before the Petty Sessions are, for the most part, drunkenness, quarreling, neglect or absenteeism from work, affiliation, petty theft, and so on.