CHAPTER IV

GOING DOWNHILL

An aged man, coming out of an arable field into the lane, pauses to look back.  He is shabbily clad, and there is more than one rent in his coat; yet it is a coat that has once been a good one, and of a superior cut to what a labourer would purchase.  In the field the ploughman to whom he has been speaking has started his team again.  A lad walks beside the horses, the iron creaks, and the ploughman holding the handles seems now to press upon them with his weight, and now to be himself bodily pulled along.  A dull November cloud overspreads the sky, and misty skits of small rain sweep across the landscape.  As the old man looks back from the gate, the chill breeze whistles through the boughs of the oak above him, tearing off the brown dry leaves, and shaking out the acorns to fall at his feet.  It lifts his grey hair, and penetrates the threadbare coat.  As he turns to go, something catches his eye on the ground, and from the mud in the gateway he picks up a cast horse-shoe.  With the rusty iron in his hand he passes slowly down the lane, and, as he goes, the bitter wind drives the fallen leaves that have been lying beside the way rustling and dancing after him.

From a farmer occupying a good-sized farm he had descended to be a farmer’s bailiff in the same locality.  But a few months since he was himself a tenant, and now he is a bailiff at 15_s_. a week and a cottage.  There is nothing dramatic, nothing sensational, in the history of his descent; but it is, perhaps, all the more full of bitter human experiences.  As a man going down a steep hill, after a long while finds himself on the edge of a precipitous chalk pit, and topples in one fall to the bottom, so, though the process of going downhill occupied so long, the actual finish came almost suddenly.  Thus it was that from being a master he found himself a servant.  He does not complain, nor appeal for pity.  His back is a little more bowed, he feels the cold a little more, his step is yet more spiritless.  But all he says about it is that ’Hard work never made any money yet.’

He has worked exceedingly hard all his lifetime.  In his youth, though the family were then well-to-do, he was not permitted to lounge about in idleness, but had to work with the rest in the fields.  He dragged his heavy nailed shoes over the furrows with the plough; he reaped and loaded in harvest time; in winter he trimmed the hedgerows, split logs, and looked after the cattle.  He enjoyed no luxurious education—­luxurious in the sense of scientifically arranged dormitories, ample meals, and vacations to be spent on horseback, or with the breechloader.  Trudging to and fro the neighbouring country town, in wind, and wet, and snow, to school, his letters were thrashed into him.  In holiday time he went to work—­his holidays, in fact, were so arranged as to fall at the time when the lad could be of most use in the field.  If an occasion arose when a lad was wanted, his lessons had to wait while he lent a hand.  He had his play, of course, as boys in all ages have had; but it was play of a rude character with the plough lads, and the almost equally rough sons of farmers, who worked like ploughmen.