They could therefore waste a large amount of time, and thus he lost twice what he saved.  Still, his intention was commendable, and his persistent, unvarying labour really wonderful.  Had he but been sharper with his men he might still have got a fair day’s work out of them while working himself.  From the habit of associating with them from boyhood he had fallen somewhat into their own loose, indefinite manner, and had lost the prestige which attaches to a master.  To them he seemed like one of themselves, and they were as much inclined to argue with him as to obey.  When he met them in the morning he would say, ‘Perhaps we had better do so and so,’ or ’Suppose we go and do this or that.’  They often thought otherwise; and it usually ended in a compromise, the master having his way in part, and the men in part.  This lack of decision ran through all, and undid all that his hard work achieved.  Everything was muddled from morn till night, from year’s end to year’s end.  As children came the living indoors became harder, and the work out of doors still more laborious.

If a farmer can put away fifty pounds a year, after paying his rent and expenses, if he can lay by a clear fifty pounds of profit, he thinks himself a prosperous man.  If this farmer, after forty years of saving, should chance to be succeeded by a son as thrifty, when, he too has carried on the same process for another twenty years, then the family may be, for village society, wealthy, with three or even four thousand pounds, besides goods and gear.  This is supposing all things favourable, and men of some ability, making the most of their opportunities.  Now reverse the process.  When children came, as said before, our hard-working farmer found the living indoors harder, and the labour without heavier.  Instead of saving fifty pounds a year, at first the two sides of the account (not that he ever kept any books) about balanced.  Then, by degrees, the balance dropped the wrong way.  There was a loss, of twenty or thirty pounds on the year, and presently of forty or fifty pounds, which could only be made good by borrowing, and so increasing the payment of interest.

Although it takes sixty years—­two generations—­to accumulate a village fortune by saving fifty pounds a year, it does not occupy so long to reduce a farmer to poverty when half that sum is annually lost.  There was no strongly marked and radical defect in his system of farming to amount for it; it was the muddling, and the muddling only, that did it.  His work was blind.  He would never miss giving the pigs their dinner, he rose at half-past three in the morning, and foddered the cattle in the grey dawn, or milked a certain number of cows, with unvarying regularity.  But he had no foresight, and no observation whatever.  If you saw him crossing a field, and went after him, you might walk close behind, placing your foot in the mark just left by his shoe, and he would never know it.  With his hands behind his