They all laughed again, and he continued: 

“I’m old enough, boys, to have seen many changes, and I tell you, all things considered, that the worst change is the education business, so far as the strength and the health of the country goes.  That, and machine work.  When I was a youngster, nearly every field-hand knew how to mow,—­now we’ve trouble enough to find an extra man who can use a scythe.  And you may put a machine on the grass as much as you like, you’ll never get the quality that you’ll get with a well-curved blade and a man’s arm and hand wielding it.  Longer work maybe, and risk of rain—­but, taking the odds for and against, men are better than machines.  Forty years we’ve scythed the grass on Briar Farm, and haven’t we had the finest crops of hay in the county?”

A chorus of gruff voices answered him: 

“Ay, Mister Jocelyn!”

“That’s right!”

“I never ’member more’n two wet seasons and then we got last load in ’tween showers,” observed one man, thoughtfully.

“There ain’t never been nothin’ wrong with Briar Farm hay crops anyway—­all the buyers knows that for thirty mile round,” said another.

“And the wheat and the corn and the barley and the oats the same,” struck in the old farmer again—­“all the seed sown by hand and the harvest reaped by hand, and every man and boy in the village or near it has found work enough to keep him in his native place, spring, summer, autumn and winter, isn’t that so?”

“Ay, ay!”

“Never a day out o’ work!”

“Talk of unemployed trouble,” went on Jocelyn, “if the old ways were kept up and work done in the old fashion, there’d be plenty for all England’s men to do, and to feed fair and hearty!  But the idea nowadays is to rush everything just to get finished with it, and then to play cards or football, and get drunk till the legs don’t know whether it’s land or water they’re standing on!  It’s the wrong way about, boys!  It’s the wrong way about!  You may hurry and scurry along as fast as you please, but you miss most good things by the way; and there’s only one end to your racing—­the grave!  There’s no such haste to drop into that, boys!  It’ll wait!  It’s always waiting!  And the quicker you go the quicker you’ll get to it!  Take time while you’re young!  That time for me is past!”

He lifted his head and looked round upon them all.  There was a strange wild look in his old eyes,—­and a sudden sense of awe fell on the rest of the company.  Farmer Jocelyn seemed all at once removed from them to a height of dignity above his ordinary bearing.  Innocent’s rose-crowned head drooped, and tears sprang involuntarily to her eyes.  She tried to hide them, not so well, however, but that Priscilla Priday saw them.

“Now, lovey child!” she whispered,—­“Don’t take on!  It’s only the doctors that’s made him low like and feelin’ blue, and he ain’t takin’ sup or morsel, but we’ll make him have a bite in his own room afterwards.  Don’t you swell your pretty eyes and make ’em red, for that won’t suit me nor Mr. Robin neither, come, come!—­ that it won’t!”