The bonnets from Regent Street are things to think over and talk of.  The old lady disinters her ancient finery; the girl, by hook or crook, is determined to dress in the fashion.  If one farmer’s wife is a fine lady, why not another?  Do not even the servant girls at the Grange come out twenty times finer than people who have a canvas bag full of sovereigns at home, and many such bags at the bank?  So that the Grange people, though they pay their way handsomely, and plough deep and manure lavishly, and lead the van of agriculture, are not, perhaps, an unmixed good.  They help on that sapping and undermining of the ancient, sturdy simplicity, the solid oak of country character, replacing it with veneer.  It is not, of course, all, or a tenth part, their fault, or in any way traceable to them.  It is part and parcel of the wide-spread social changes which have gradually been proceeding.

But the tenant farmer’s wife who made the butter and cheese, and even helped to salt bacon, where is she now?  Where are the healthy daughters that used to assist her?  The wife is a fine lady—­not, indeed, with carriage and pair, but with a dandy dog-cart at least; not with three-guinea bonnets, but with a costly sealskin jacket.  There are kid gloves on her hands; there is a suspicion of perfume about her; there is a rustling of silk and satin, and a waving of ostrich feathers.  The daughter is pale and interesting, and interprets Beethoven, and paints the old mill; while a skilled person, hired at a high price, rules in the dairy.  The son rides a-hunting, and is glib on the odds.  The ’offices’—­such it is the fashion to call the places in which work was formerly done—­are carefully kept in the background.  The violets and snowdrops and crocuses are rooted up, all the sweet and tender old flowers ruthlessly eradicated, to make way for a blazing parterre after the manner of the suburban villa—­gay in the summer, in the spring a wilderness of clay, in the autumn a howling desert of musty evergreens..

The ‘civilisation’ of the town has, in fact, gone out and taken root afresh in the country.  There is no reason why the farmer should not be educated; there is no reason why his wife should not wear a sealskin jacket, or the daughter interpret Beethoven.  But the question arises, Has not some of the old stubborn spirit of earnest work and careful prudence gone with the advent of the piano and the oil painting?  While wearing the dress of a lady, the wife cannot tuck up her sleeves and see to the butter, or even feed the poultry, which are down at the pen across ’a nasty dirty field.’  It is easy to say that farming is gone to the dogs, that corn is low, and stock uncertain, and rents high, and so forth.  All that is true, but difficulties are nothing new; nor must too much be expected from the land.