Read Ebook: The Life of Thomas Wanless Peasant by Wilson A J Alexander Johnstone

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This was true enough, for Hawthorn had now no keeper, and, for that matter, little game. He allowed his tenants to do as they pleased, and one of the deepest grievances his neighbours had against him, was that these tenants thinned their game wherever their lands marched with his.

To this sally Thomas, however, made no answer beyond a smothered groan. The man's spirit was too much broken to bear rough comfort of this kind, as his visitor instantly perceived. Changing his tone at once, the Captain bent over the bench where the prisoner sat hanging his head, and laying his hand on Thomas's shoulder, added--

"Come, come, Tom, my boy; bless my life! don't lose heart because you've been a fool. I'll see that the chicks don't starve, and you'll soon be out of this, and a man again."

The kind tones of Hawthorn's voice affected Tom more even than the promise. He tried to speak, but his voice broke in sobs.

"Tut, tut. 'Pon my life, don't, Tom, d--n it, man, don't," spluttered the Captain; but, as Tom did not stop, he grasped his hand suddenly and gave it a hearty grip. Then he turned and fled, afraid probably of himself betraying his feelings.

His visit did Thomas much good, and he bore his trials more patiently henceforth, though the bitterness of his heart at times nearly maddened him. I can never forget the description which he gave me in after days of the agonies suffered by him during those horrible six months. We were seated together in his little garden one September evening, the sun was far down in the west, the ruddy glow of a calm, bright autumn evening fell athwart Wanless's grey, worn face, lighting it with a sober brilliance that fitted well the fixed look of sadness that sat on it as he then told me of that dark time. His voice was calm for the most part, although full of subdued passion; and the impression his narrative made on me was so deep that I can almost give you his very words.

"At first," said he, "I felt like a caged wild beast, and could do nothing but chafe. The night in the keeper's out-house, where the villain kept me to save himself trouble, with both hands and feet cruelly tied, had been bad enough; and the nights and days in Leamington lock-up were hard to bear, but a kind of hope sustained me, and I did not fully comprehend what loss of liberty was till I lay in Warwick Jail. For three nights after I entered that hell upon earth I did not sleep a wink. The very air I breathed seemed to choke me. Sometimes I felt so mad that I could hardly keep from dashing my head against the walls of the cell. Had I been alone perhaps I might have done it, but there were five beside myself cooped up in a den not much bigger than my kitchen, and in the darkness I was for a time horribly afraid lest one or other of these men should do me an injury. Though in one sense eager for death, I did not like being killed; and when not raging I was trembling with fear. It was nervousness, no doubt, but you can hardly wonder when I tell you what my neighbours were. One was a burglar from Birmingham, sentenced to transportation for stealing a coat from somebody's hall; two were miners from Dudley way, "doing" sixty days for kicking a chum and breaking his leg, another was a wild, brutish-like day labourer, who had got six months at last Assizes for cutting his wife's throat, not quite to the death, and the last was a poor, hungry youth of a tailor's apprentice, who had got the same sentence for stealing some cloth. We were a strange lot, and I feared these men in the darkness. If one moved, my heart leapt to my mouth; and the horrible language in which some of them indulged, made my flesh creep. That wild labourer especially terrified me. What if the murderous frenzy was to come upon him, and he should try to throttle me in the dark.

"Then she picked up a bit, and tried to cheer me, as women will when the worst comes. She told me that Mrs. Robins was very kind, and had come to look after the children for her that day, having none of her own, and no fear of the infection, and she was sure that the neighbours would never see her want. That was some comfort at the time; but once I came to myself in jail the thought that I was now helpless, that my family might be dying and I unable to reach them, raised anew the agony in my mind. I saw them gathered round our Sally's bed weeping for their absent father. My wife's weary looks and thin white face haunted me in the night seasons far worse than the wife mutilator. What could neighbours do for her in such a strait; what could I do now? The thought of my helplessness came over me with waves of agonising self-abasement and disgust, till my nerves seemed to crack and my brain spin round. Often did I stuff my sleeve into my mouth to stop myself from crying out as I lay tossing on the floor of the den. I would beat my head with my clenched hands till the sparks danced in my eyes, and groan till my neighbours muttered curses through their sleep. Oh, I thought, if I could but get an hour with my little ones, to see wee Sally and the baby in their bed, to watch poor Jack and Fan, and help the worn out mother. An hour! nay, half an hour, only five minutes! God, it was unbearable; it was hell to be caged like this!

"And what had I done to be thus torn from my wife and children, and made to consort with brutal criminals? What had I done? Killed three rabbits, vermin that curse God's earth and devour the bread of the poor. They belonged to nobody any more'n rats or mice or weasels, and did nobody good in this world. Why, the man that had nearly killed his wife was not harder treated than me. What then was my crime? Was I indeed a criminal? I asked myself again and again, and the answer came--'No, Tom Wanless, but you were worse; you were a fool. You knew the power of the landlords; you knew that to them the rabbit was a sacred animal, and that they could punish you if they caught you. You were a fool ever to put yourself in their clutches.' Ah yes, there was the sting of it. How could I hope to escape doom when all the world except the labourers were on one side.

"Well," Thomas continued, after a short pause, during which he leant back and watched the changing tints of gold flitting across the western sky, "well, that mood also passed, and after the old captain had been to see me I got a little quieter. But the jailers did not make life easy for me, I can tell you. Because I was silent, speaking little, eating little, and hardly fit for the task they set me upon that weary treadmill, they gave me a taste of the whip many a time, and abused me for a sullen gallows bird, but I paid no heed.

"Within a fortnight after my punishment began, little Tom brought me word that two of my children, Jack and Lucy, were dead, and that Fanny was not expected to live. When I heard this news I laughed a bitter laugh, and said, 'Thank God, some good has been done. The squires won't imprison them, anyway!' My boy looked terrified for a moment, and then fell a-weeping bitterly. The sight of him crouching at my feet, and quivering in passionate grief, brought me a bit to. A vision of my dear little ones, of my dying wee Fan, swept over me; my heart yearned for them, and I mingled my tears with my son's. I charged him to be kind to mother, and tried to comfort him. Poor lad, poor lad! He is in Australia now, and has a farm of his own. The sorrow of that time is past for him long ago."

Here my old friend paused, wiping the tears from his eyes furtively, and sighing softly to himself. The dying glow of the sunset was now on his face, gleaming in his silvery hair, and making his sad but animated features shine with a soft glory. I sat still and gazed at him with feelings too strong for speech. After a little he turned to me with a smile, and said:--

"Yes, my friend, that's all passed, and many sorrows beside, nor do I now curse God as I look back upon them. But I cannot tell you more to-night. I didn't think that I should have been moved so much by recalling that old story. Let us go indoors, the night is growing chilly."

Future conversations gave me most of the particulars of that time, but I cannot harrow the reader's feelings with a full recital of all that Thomas Wanless felt and suffered in these six months of misery. Three of his children died while he chafed and toiled in Warwick Jail. The heart-stricken mother alone received their dying words, heard their last farewell. Kind neighbours tried to comfort her. The parson's wife even called, and said, "Poor woman, I'm afraid you've had too many children to bring up. I'll see if the vicar can spare you a few shillings from the poor box;" but the shillings never came, much to Thomas's satisfaction in after days. Perhaps Codling thought the family altogether too reprobate for his charity.

It would have gone hard indeed with Mrs. Wanless and the little ones spared to her but for old Captain Hawthorn. Though verging on seventy, and by no means strong, no single week elapsed all that winter when his cheery voice was not heard in the cottage. Often he came twice a week, but never with any ostentation of charity. On the contrary, he went so far the other way as to pretend to take a bond over the cottage for money, professedly lent to the family, and without which they must have gone into the workhouse. He never, perhaps, felt so like a hypocrite in his life as he did when he took this bond to the jail for Thomas to sign. Young Tom was put back to his work on the home farm, and his wages raised on some pretence or other to six shillings a week. The dry, old man, so hard and repellant, had, after all, a human heart in him that my Lord Bishop of Worcester might have envied had he ever experienced any desire for such an organ. More true sympathy with distress was shown by this hardened old Voltarian since this family had attracted his notice than by all the squires of the district and the parsons to boot. It had not yet become fashionable for the latter to rehearse deeds of philanthropy in pedantic garments. Hawthorn's fault was not want of heart or of sympathy, but a self-centredness which prevented him from seeing his duty, except when, as in this instance, it was forced upon him. Yet, after all, what could he have done to help the poor around him that would not in some way have redounded to their hurt? Charity doles would have demoralised them more than their hard lot did; and any opening of the door for them to help themselves would have brought hatred, contumely, and perhaps real injury to them and him. He could not raise wages by his fiat, nor could he break up his land and distribute it to the people. All the laws of the country, as well as the prejudices of "society," were against him, if he had ever thought of so wild a project; which I do not suppose he ever did. He sat apart and mocked at a world with which he had no sympathy; whose hollowness, self-seeking, and cruelty, hid beneath infinite hypocrisies, he thoroughly understood.

And this good, at least, has to be recorded of him, that he saved the family of Thomas Wanless from want, by consequence, also, in all probability, saving Thomas himself from becoming an abandoned Ishmaelite. The sight of his family beggared, homeless, and in the workhouse, either would have driven him reckless or broken his heart. From that sight, at least, he was saved; and Thomas has often told me that the conduct of the old squire during these six months did more to revive hope in his heart and keep him from losing all faith in God or man, than any other single event of his life. Yet had his heart bitterness enough.

"I remember," he said, one night as we conversed together; "I remember the morning I left jail. It was a warm, May morning, and the air was so fresh and sweet that the first breath of it made me feel quite giddy with joy. 'Free! free! I am free!' I whispered softly to myself, and with difficulty refrained from capering about the road like a madman, as the joyous thought surged through my heart. It lasted only for a few moments. Pain took hold of the heels of my joy as usual. I was a man disgraced. Why should I be glad to get out of jail? Were not its forbidding, gloomy walls the best shelter left for one like me? Why should I be glad? The law of the land had branded me a criminal; let the law makers enjoy paying for their work.

"Ah, no; disgraced as I was, filled with bitter passionate hate of those above me as my heart might be, I was not yet ready to stoop to deliberate crime as a mode of revenge. The memory of my lost children and my lonely, heart-broken wife stole into my heart and brought the tears to my eyes. The four that were left to me would be waiting on this May morning for my home coming. I would go home.

"So I started; but when I reached the castle bridge my heart again failed me. I was weak through long confinement, ill-usage, and want of food, for the messes served to us in that jail were often worse than I would have given to my pig. The very thought of meeting a village neighbour terrified me. My limbs shook, and I crept through a gap in the fence, resolved to hide till night and steal home in the darkness. For a little while I sat behind a bush at the water's edge, feeling a coward, but wholly unable to scold myself for it. Then I crept along the bank of the Avon towards Grimscote, till I reached a clump of osiers, into which I plunged. The ground was very damp, and here and there almost swampy; but presently I found a dry mound, and there I lay down, buried from all eyes. How long I lay I cannot tell, for I paid no heed to time, though I gradually became calmer. Once again I was in contact with nature. The air was full of the music of birds, and the chirp of insects among the grass sounded almost like the movement of life in the very ground itself. A sweet smell of hawthorn blossom came to me from some old trees close by, and now and then I heard the plash of oars on the river, and voices came to me sweet and clear off the water. Gradually I became more hopeful. Life was all around me; the bushes themselves seemed moved by it as I lay beneath their shade. Behind me the traffic of the high road made a constant rattle, and beyond the river I heard the bleating of lambs. And life somehow came back to me also. I arose with new hopes in my breast. All could not yet be lost to me, I somehow felt; and, at any rate, I would go home, for I began to be very hungry.

"I often stopped on the way with weariness and faint-heartedness, but did not again turn back, and by two o'clock in the afternoon I reached my own cottage. My wife welcomed me with a burst of crying. I learnt from her that she had begun to dread that I had done something rash. She and the little ones had gone to meet me in the morning as far as the castle bridge, which they must have reached soon after I lay down among the willows. There they sat for a while hoping that I would come, but seeing nothing of me they crept back again with hearts sad enough, you may be sure. I was not long behind them, and my wife soon brightened enough to be able to eat some dinner with me; but my heart smote me for being so selfish and unkind as to go and hide as if no one had to be considered but myself."

Such in faint outline was Thomas's account of his release from prison. His meeting with his family was sad beyond description. In the short six months of his absence three of his little ones had been put under the sod. Out of a family of eight in all he had now but four left. A great mercy that it was so, some will say; and possibly they may be right. The world's goods are so ill distributed that death is for many the only blessing left. Nevertheless, I question if the sorrow of the labourer at the loss of his children was not keener than that of many who need not fear a want of bread for their offspring. He had toiled and suffered for all the eight, and the love that grows up in the heart through such discipline as his is akin to the deepest and holiest passion known to man. Thomas and his wife mourned for their dead to their own life's end, because the little ones had been part of their life. Is it so with you, pert censor of the miserable poor?

Though sorrowing, Thomas had yet no time to nurse his sorrow. The world had to be faced again, and work to be found. For sentimental griefs and morbid wailings in the world's ear the Wanlesses had no time. At first Thomas got some jobs from Mr. Hawthorn, but he soon saw that they were jobs mostly created on purpose for him, and he could not bear the thought of living on charity, no matter how disguised. Therefore, he began to hunt about for odd work in the neighbourhood, and found much difficulty in getting it. His recent imprisonment told against him everywhere, if not in keeping work from his hands, at all events in low pay for the work. The farmers had now got their feet on his neck, and took it out of him, as they alone knew how; for the brutalised slave is always the cruellest of slave-drivers. But Thomas fought on, and for the best part of a year contrived to exist with the help that young Tom's wages gave. He did no more; nay, not always so much; for he and his wife sometimes wanted their own dinners that their children might have enough. Still he existed; lived through the year somehow and was thankful, notwithstanding the fact that he had made no progress in paying off his debt to the old Captain. "He can take the cottage, Thomas," said his wife. "Someone will pay him rent enough for it, though we can't; but we can get a hovel somewhere."

He was spared this last sacrifice, for about this time old Hawthorn died, and a sealed packet addressed to Thomas Wanless was found among his papers. When the labourer came to open this, he found that it contained his bond with the signature torn off, a receipt in full for the money advanced, and a ?20 note. On a slip of paper was written in the Captain's scraggy, trembling hand, "Don't mention this to a living soul, Tom Wanless, or by God I'll haunt you.--E.H." Thus the scorned infidel was soft-hearted and characteristic to the last. His estate passed to a cousin, who soon gave the tenants cause to remember how good the old Captain had been. And once more he had kept the labourer's heart from breaking. The deliverance from debt which this packet brought, and the prodigious wealth a ?20 note appeared to be to Thomas, renewed his courage and made him resolve to strike further afield in search of better paid labour. Railway making was at its height all over the country, and he had often thought of becoming a navvy. Now he decided to be one if he could get work on the line down Worcester way. A bit of that line came within fifteen miles of Ashbrook, and he might therefore see his family now and then at least Young Tom was to stay at home, and the 5s. a-week, to which his wages was reduced after old Hawthorn's death, would help to keep house till work was found by his father. The ?20 was not to be touched till the very last extremity, and in the meantime Thomas put it in as a deposit in a savings bank at Stratford-on-Avon. He would not deposit it in Warwick lest questions might be asked, and the Captain's dying command be in consequence disobeyed.

The new plans succeeded better almost than Thomas had hoped. He got work on the railway; it was very hard work, but the wages were good; at first he only got 18s. per week, and he began by stinting himself in order to send 10s. of this home; but he soon found that to be a mistake. His work demanded full vigour of body, and to be in full vigour he must be well fed. The other men had meat of some kind three times a day, and Thomas followed their example, with the best results. Not only did he stand by his work with the rest, but he displayed such energy and intelligence that within a few weeks he obtained charge of the work in a deep cutting at 28s. per week. Of this he saved from 12s. to 14s. a-week, after paying for clothes, lodgings, and food. It seemed very little, and he grudged much the cost of his own living; but there was no help for it. Besides, what he saved now was more than all he earned in Ashbrook, except for a few weeks during harvest. Much reason had he to thank the dairyman's wife for feeding him in his youth so as to fit him now for a navvy's toil.

Truly the life was rough, and little to Wanless' liking, yet he worked with a heart and hope rarely his before. Altogether this job lasted for two years, and regularly all that time Thomas went home once a month with his savings. Sometimes he had more than 20 miles to walk each way, but he had health, and never failed. Starting on Saturday evenings, in wet weather and dry, summer and winter, he would reach home early on Sunday morning, when after a good sleep, he passed a few happy hours, and then started on the Sunday afternoon for his work again.

IS OF THE NATURE OF A SERMON.

During these two years the attitude of Thomas's mind changed much towards society and its institutions. He may be said for the first time to have become a religious man, and his religion was of the simpler and more unsophisticated type which comes to a man who knows little of dogma, but much of the contents of the Bible. That book was studied by him as something fresh and altogether new on the lonely Sundays he passed amongst the navvies. He took to it at first more because he had no other book to read, but it laid hold of his imagination after a time, and he began to test the world around him by the lofty morality of the New Testament. In due course the thoughts that burned within him found utterance and infected some of his fellow workmen. Almost before he was aware a certain following gathered round him. They drew together in the parlour of the inn, which most of the navvies frequented, and discussed things political and religious on the Saturday and Sunday nights.

The wilder spirits soon nicknamed Thomas and his friends the Saints, and he himself went by the sobriquet of Methody Tom; but, though jeered at and sometimes cursed by the wilder sort, their influence spread, and radical views of society were canvassed among these navvies with a freedom that would have made parson and squire alike shiver with horror had they known. But they did not know. How could they? Such creatures as navvies were not, strictly speaking, human at all. They lived beyond the pale, like the Irish ancestors of many among them, and were essentially of the nature of wild beasts, for whom the policeman's baton or the soldier's musket was the only available moral force.

That was the only time they ever saw a parson of the Church during these two years; and no doubt this poor curate felt that they were a reprobate crew whom the Church did quite right to abandon to their fate. It is so much pleasanter and easier to play at pietism amongst well-bred, comfortable people "of good society" than to save souls. The sweet order of a gorgeous ritual, the vanities of richly-embroidered garments, squabbles about archaic rites as worthless as an Egyptian mummy--these things are more valuable to the modern parson, and more pleasing in the sight of his God, than the lives of such men as Wanless and his fellow-labourers. For the parson's God is the God of the rich, to whom gorgeous ritual and sensuous music are necessary as foretastes of the blessedness of an aesthetic paradise.

So be it: far be it from me to question the taste of parson or parson's following. They can go their own way, only it may be permitted to one to point out that outside their charmed circle there are forces at work, before the power of which their fair fabric may yet crumble and disappear like sand heaps before the rushing tide. Thomas Wanless and his friends were rude and unlettered, but they had definite ideas enough, and a wild sense of justice. In their dim way they tried to fit together the various parts of the human life that lay around them, and failing to do so, as better than they have failed, they came to the conclusion that they and their class were cheated by the rest. Democracy, communism, subversive ideas of all kinds, therefore, found currency among them, as in ever-growing volume they find currency now. Imagine if you can these men trying to evolve the prototype of a modern Lord Bishop, in lawn sleeves and pompous state, from the simple records of the New Testament. Can you wonder at their failure in that instance, or in many such like? Where could they find church or chapel that was no respecter of persons? in which the possession of money and power was not the ultimate test of true godliness? Is it astonishing that in placing the ideal and actual side by side, these men should have come to the conclusion that the actual was a fraud: that the whole basis of modern society was corrupt?

Do not, I beseech you, pass lightly by the doings of these men, most sublime Lord Bishops, most serene peers of the realm, smug buyers of county votes. These ideas are spreading all around you. Few possessed them fifty years ago among the agricultural poor; but there, as elsewhere, democracy is getting educated, is awaking to the reality of things, and will make its feelings known to you in a manner you little dream of one of these days. Your Olympus will prove but a molehill when the earth shakes with the onset of the millions on whose necks you have sat all these ages. Titles are a mockery, hereditary dignities a contempt, in the eyes of men who live face to face with the hard realities of existence. A new life is abroad in the world. The image-breaker is exalted above my Lord Bishop in all his glory of lawn sleeves and piety in uniform by men like Wanless and his friends. They want to know, not what part "my lord" professes to act, what creed this or that snug Church dignitary chants or drones; but what his life is worth? What are you? in short, is the question, not what you give yourself out to be; and, depend upon it, if the answer is unsatisfactory, you and your hypocrisies will disappear together.

Nothing struck me so forcibly in my intercourse with Wanless as the extraordinary bitterness with which he spoke of the English Church. To it he seemed in his later life to have transferred the greater part of his hatred of the landed gentry. He viewed it as an organised blasphemy, and worse than that, as the jailor, so to say, by whom the chains of a miserable captivity had been rivetted for ages on the limbs of the toiling poor. The ground for this attitude of mind on the part of the labourer was easily discovered. He read his Bible much, and endeavoured to fit its precepts and the example of its greatest characters to the life around him, and of course he failed. The more he tried to bring together the presentment of Christianity afforded by the modern Church and teaching of the New Testament, the more he saw their divergencies. This set him pondering, and he soon came to the conclusion that this modern institution was not Christian at all, but Pagan. It was a department of State, paid by the State, and employed by it for the purpose of deluding the people into the belief that the existing order of life was divinely appointed. How effectively it had done this work, he said, let history show. The clergy had aided and abetted the gentry in all their robberies of the people; it had been the instrument of many flagrant thefts of endowments left for the education of the poor; there never had been a reform proposed calculated to benefit the people that had not been ardently opposed by this organised band of hypocrites, and no class of the community was so habitually, so flagrantly selfish as preachers. Take them all in all, Thomas Wanless declared, the people who preached for a trade, be they dissenters or Anglican, gave him a lower idea of human nature than any navvy he ever met. "Their trade makes them bad," he often declared; "and I suppose I ought to pity the miserable wretches, but they do so much mischief that I really cannot."

Once I recollect urging the commonplace argument that there were many good men among them, but he caught me up short with--

"Yes, yes, I admit all that; but that proves nothing in favour of either the Church or the parson's trade. These men would have been good anywhere, as Papists, Mohamedans, or Hindus, just as certainly as in church or chapel. It is their nature to, and they cannot help it. But their very goodness is a curse to people, sir--yes, a curse, for they prop up fabrics and institutions that but for them would long ago have been too rotten to stand."

Thus it will be seen that Wanless, though in his way a profoundly religious man, was in no sense a sectary. He was in fact ranged among the iconoclasts. He sighed for a living faith, not a dead creed; and were he living to-day he would certainly give his hearty support to that band of men who wage war on the shams of modern creeds, who mock unceasingly at the disgusting spectacle of men who call themselves disciples of Christ wrangling over the cut and embroidery of garments, and trying to make themselves martyrs for the sake of a candle or two. The tractarian movement attracted Thomas's attention in a dim way, and he was amused at the frightful din made by the conversions to Romanism which accompanied that curious upheaval of mediaevalism. Not that he understood much of the meaning of what was going on. It was not worth discovering, he said; but he was amused over it, and roundly declared that for this and all other ills of the Church there was but one cure--to take away its money. "Let these parsons try living by faith," he would often exclaim. "If they believe in God as they say, why do they not trust him for a living? Their proud stomachs would come down a bit if they are just turned adrift in a body and let shift for themselves. But Lord, what a howl they'll make if the people get up and say we'll have no more of your mummeries, we want our money for a better purpose. They won't think much about God then, I can tell you. It will be every man for himself, and who can grab the most. I never have any patience with parsons, never. They are bad from the beginning, bad all through, self-deluders and misleaders of others at the best, and at the worst--well, not much more except in degree."

"These are the mere ravings of an ignorant peasant," most readers will exclaim. I do not deny that in a certain sense they may seem only that. Yet look around and consider the signs of the times before you dismiss these things as of no significance. What means the spread of secularism amongst the working classes of the present day, the contempt for religion and parsons which most of them display? Is it not a most ominous indication of future trouble for serene lord bishops and their brood when events bring them face to face with the people? I do not admire Charles Bradlaugh's teaching on many points; but I cannot deny the power that he and such as he wield on the common people. It is a power that increases with the spread of education; and what does it betoken? Only this; that in time, for one man among the peasantry who now thinks like Thomas Wanless there will be tens of thousands. The churches and chapels themselves, with their exceedingly worldly respectability, produce these men more certainly than all the teachings of the Bradlaughs; nay, Bradlaugh himself is directly the product of a corrupt, time-serving and utterly blasphemous church organisation. Therefore be not too contemptuous of sentiments like those of this peasant. They are significant of many things--of a coming democracy that will at least try to burn up the rottenness of our modern ultra Pagan-civilization.

On other questions than those of Church and State the opinions of Thomas Wanless were equally uncompromising, and, perhaps, equally impracticable. His intelligence was far deeper than his reading, and much of his political economy, as well as of his code of social morals, was taken from the Bible. To my thinking he could have gone to no better book, but I am also free to admit that his too exclusive study of it gave a quaint and sometimes impracticable turn to his conceptions that may lead many to have a poor opinion of his wisdom.

On the land question, for example, he grew to be a kind of disciple of Moses. He would have had the whole country parcelled out amongst the people--each family enjoying the inalienable right to a certain bit of the soil. The year of jubilee was also, in his eyes, a most merciful and just provision for freeing the unfortunate, or the children of the spendthrift, from the grasp of the usurer--always the most relentless of men--and he often exclaimed--"How much better my lot would have been to-day had a jubilee year brought back to me and mine the land my grandfathers sacrificed in the stress of hard times." And not to land only would he have applied this principle, but to all kinds of indebtedness. "A limit of time should be fixed," he said, "beyond which the debtor should be free from his debt, unless he had committed a crime." The national debt itself he would have treated on this principle; and few things excited his wrath more quickly than any mention of the heavy burden which the consolidated debt continued to be to the English people. In national matters he would have had no debt remaining beyond 30 years, on the principle that it was a crime to cast the burdens of the present on posterity. Freedom to borrow indefinitely was in his eyes, moreover, the cause of much abominable robbery and crime. Next to the Church, however, the object of his deepest hatred and strongest contempt was modern kingship; and here again his inspiration was drawn from the Bible. He told me that he often read Samuel's description of the curse of kingship to his children on Sunday evenings, with a view to make them proper Republicans; and his greatest interest in modern history consisted in tracing the working of this curse in England for the last 200 years. To this evil principle he declared that we owed most of our social miseries, all our wars of aggression, our national debt, our social corruptions, our bad land laws, our standing army, and perhaps even our Established Church, with all its crop of spiritual, moral, and social perversions.

It is easy to understand how a man holding opinions like these should exercise a tremendous influence on the better class of his fellow-workmen. To those who gathered about him in the evenings he was never weary of enlarging on topics like these; and had the nature of the work in hand kept the men permanently together, Thomas must in time have appeared as the leader of a formidable school of democrats. But the navvy is here to-day and gone to-morrow, and the seed which Thomas sowed was scattered far and wide ere two years were over. The good he did is therefore untraceable, yet doubtless his work bore fruit in ways and places unseen, and in after days may have increased the receptivity of the labouring poor after a fashion that the modern agitator thought due wholly to his own exertions.

Over the wild Irishmen who formed the majority of the gangs on the line Thomas never obtained any influence; and, in his opinion, they were either a race of men bad from its very beginning, or whose nature had been warped and debased by a long course of shameful tyranny and deep-rooted habits of submission to degrading superstitions. However produced, the Irish, in his esteem, were wretched creatures. They lacked honesty and independence, and would beg like pariahs one hour from a man whom they would treacherously murder the next in their drunken furies. More than once he had the greatest difficulty in keeping clear of the devastating fights with which these wild men of the west were in the habit of finishing up their drunken revels, and once he, and the more respectable men who followed him, had to arm themselves and help to protect some villages in the neighbourhood of the line from being stormed and sacked by a squad of Irishmen out for a spree. Life surrounded by such elements was dreary at the best, and, good though the wages might be, Thomas was not sorry when the job was finished, and the way open for him to return once more to his own little cottage in Ashbrook.

MAY INDICATE TO THE READER, AMONGST OTHER THINGS, SOME OF THE ADMIRABLE ARRANGEMENTS WHEREBY ENGLAND OBTAINS MEN FOR A STANDING ARMY.

Had Thomas Wanless known what was in store for him in the future he might have elected to leave Ashbrook for ever, and continue the life of a railway navvy. As such his pay was good, and by thrift he might save enough money either to venture on small contracts for himself, or start some kind of business in one of the growing midland towns. But Thomas did not consider these possibilities. The life he led grew more and more repulsive to him as time went on; and he yearned unceasingly for the quietude of his native village, and for his own fireside peace. Besides, he hungered to get back to work on the land. If he could not get fields of his own to till, at least he might hope to again help to till the fields of others, and to watch the corn bloom and ripen as of yore.

Against the odds and prejudices thus at work, Wanless fought manfully for more than two years. When he could get work he laboured at it early and late, and when, as often happened, work was denied him, he tended his little garden and his allotment patch with the closeness of a Chinese farmer. His flowers were the pride of the village, and his care coaxed the old trees in his garden into a degree of fruit-bearing that almost put to shame the vigour of their youth. Yet he could not always make ends meet; and when he began to see his little hoard melting away, his heart once more failed him. If the farmers would not have him he must once more try elsewhere, and again a local railway afforded him a refuge. He became a "ganger" on the Stratford line at 14s. a-week, and for more than four years made his daily journey backwards and forwards on his "beat," winter and summer, in cold and heat, well or ill. In one sense, this work was not so hard as a farm labourer's or a navvy's is, but it told on the health as much. Exposure, thin clothing, and poor food did their work rapidly enough, and Thomas's limbs began to stiffen, and his back to grow bent before his time. Like his fellows, he promised to become an old man at 50, but he would have stuck to his work had not a sharp attack of pleurisy laid him up in the winter of 1855, and once more compelled him to seek to live by farm labour. He could not face the bleak unsheltered railway track again, and even if he could, there was no room for him. His place had been filled up. With a weary heart and a spirit well-nigh crushed, Thomas once more looked for work on the farms around Ashbrook. "Is there no hope for us, Sally, lass?" he would often cry. "Must we go to the workhouse at last?" "Ay, the workhouse, the workhouse!" he would exclaim. "The parsons promise us a deal in the other world, but that's the best they think we deserve here. Well, perhaps they mean to give us a better relish for the other world when it comes."

Thomas had one thing to cheer him, though, and no doubt that gave him more courage to face the world again than he otherwise would have had. His precious son, young Tom, had emigrated to Australia about a year before this terrible illness had enfeebled his father. He had gone as an assisted emigrant, but the old man had given him ?10 of old Hawthorn's ?20 to begin the New World upon. The parting had cost the family much, and the father most of all; but they felt it to be for the best. There was no room to grow in the old land; in the new there was a great freedom. The lad dreamt of gold nuggets; but the wiser father bade him stick to the land as soon as he could get a bit to stick to.

This departure was a loss to the family purse, for the youth had obtained pretty steady work, and generously gave all into the keeping of his mother. But Jane and Jacob were now also out into the world, winning such bread as they could get, and the family burden was therefore lighter. Jane was general servant to a dissenting draper in Leamington, and Jacob enjoyed the proud distinction of being waggoner's boy at Whitbury farm, now tenanted by a go-ahead Scotch ex-bailiff, who had succeeded the Pembertons when they went to the dogs with drink and horse-dealing. This hard-fisted, ferret-eyed agriculturist worked his men and boys as they had never been worked before, but he did not make the hours of labour so long, and he paid them a trifle better than his neighbours, whose jealousy and dislike he thereby increased. Probably he rather liked to be contemned by his fellows. It increased the self-sufficiency of his righteousness, and made him the more proud of being a strict Calvinistic Presbyterian, endowed with a conscience as inelastic as his creed. Be that as it may, this man gave Jacob Wanless 10s. a week and made the lad work for it. Jacob was not then 17, and at his previous place had only obtained half that sum with a grudge. But then his work had been a long day's drawl too often, while now his duty as under waggoner was practically a good 10 to 12 hours' toil as stable assistant, feeder of stalled cattle, and general labourer about the farm.

From these causes Wanless had some ground for hope, although work was difficult for him to get, and his power to do it when got less than it had been. And when he looked round him his causes for thankfulness multiplied. Was not his neighbour Hewens, the under gardener at the Grange, worse off than he, with a younger family of seven, one of whom was an object, and a weekly income averaging about 9s. a week all the year round. Thomas's old and tried friend Satchwell, the blacksmith, too, with his three children living and a wife dying in decline, had surely a harder lot than he, for all the coldness of farmers and contumely of parish deities.

As spring warmed into summer, indeed, Wanless's strength and heart came back to him in a measure. His hopes were chastened, but they were there still, and asserted their life. Good news came from his far-away son, too. Young Tom had taken his father's advice, and, avoiding the charms of gold digging, had gone to work at high pay on a sheep run. Already he spoke of buying a farm of his own, and getting father and mother and all the rest to join him in the colony. Surely any man's heart would warm at prospects like these, and Thomas so far entertained the project as to talk it over with his friends, Brown, Satchwell, and Robins, who agreed in thinking it "mighty fine," and in wishing that they could mount and go along. "A vain wish, friends," Brown would say, "vain so far as I am concerned, for I cannot herd sheep or hold a plough, and they want neither parish clerks nor schoolmasters in the bush." Robins felt that he was too old and too poor to think of the change, and Satchwell sighed often as he thought on what a sea voyage might yet do for his wife. But as for Thomas, of course he could go when his son sent him the money, they said; and he, remembering that he had still a few pounds of his hoard unspent, almost thought that he could. His family should have the first chance, though. Jane and Jacob might both be able in another year to get away to the new country so full of hope; and it was best that the old hulk should stay at home, perhaps. So ran his thoughts for these two, but he always stopped when he reached Sally, his youngest living child, and precious to him as the apple of his eye. She was the fairest of the family, and her father's darling above all the others. Her, at all events, he felt he could not part with. If she went away at all her mother and he must go too.

As yet "wee Sal," as she was called, though by this time nigh fourteen years old, had not been suffered to go out to service. She had got more schooling than the others, thanks to the better means that her father had during part of her childish years; thanks likewise to his partiality for her. In this you will say he was weak; but let him who is strong on such a point fling stones. I cannot blame Thomas much for committing so common a sin as to love most yearningly his youngest child; but I admit that his fondness was perhaps to her hurt. Not that she was taught to love idleness or things above her station. Far from that. Kept at home though she was, she had to work. In the summer season she helped her mother to tend the garden, and to carry flowers, vegetables, and fruit to Leamington for sale. Under her mother's eye she at other times learned something of laundry work. But her schooling; what could she do with that? Did it not tend to give her vain thoughts above her lot; for her lot was fixed more even than that of her brothers. The peasant maid could never hope to advance to aught beyond some kind of upper service in a rich man's family; a service often increasingly degrading in proportion as it is nominally high. She might become a ladies' maid, perhaps, and marry a butler in time, or she might fill her head with vanities, and in apeing those above her sink to the gutter. The love of Thomas for his child exposed her to many risks, when it took the form of getting old Brown to teach her all he knew. If she could only get to the new country at the other end of the world all that might be changed. She might be happy and prosperous as an Australian farmer's wife. Yes, that would be best; but they must all go. Neither Thomas nor his wife, who shared his partiality, could think of parting with Sally. Jacob might go first to help Tom to gather means to take out the rest; and Jane might even go with him could a way be found; but not Sally: that sacrifice would be too much.

In all probability the emigration plan might have been carried out in this sense that very winter, if an emigration agent could have been got to take Jacob and Jane, had not misfortune once more found the labourer and smitten his hopes. Jacob enlisted. He was by no means a bad boy, but like all youths, enjoyed what is called a bit of fun; and, in fun, he had betaken himself to a kind of hiring fair held in Warwick, in November, and called the "Mop." There was no need for him to go, as he was not out of work, but the day was a kind of prescriptive holiday, and others were going, so why not Jacob? Idle, careless, and brisk as a lark, the lad followed where others led; drank for the sake of good companionship more than his unaccustomed head could carry; and when in a wild, devil-may-care mood was picked up by a recruiting sergeant, who soon joked and argued him into taking the shilling. A neighbour saw the boy, half-tipsy, following the sergeant and his party through the fair with recruit's ribbons fluttering round his head, and rushed home to tell Thomas as fast as his legs could carry him. The old man was horror-struck; and the boy's mother broke into bitter wailing. Thomas, however, wasted no time in useless grief, but took the road for Warwick, within three minutes of hearing the news, in the hope of being in time to buy his boy off. He had an idea that if he managed to pay the smart-money before Jacob was sworn in, the lad might escape with little difficulty. But he was too late. The sergeant was too well up to his work to wait in Warwick all night, in order that parents might come in the morning and beleaguer him for their betrayed children. Long before Thomas reached the town and began his search for his son the sergeant had gone off with his entire netful to Birmingham.

As soon as Thomas found this to be the case he made for the railway station, intending to follow his boy without asking himself whether it would do any good. But there again he was baulked. The cheap train to Birmingham had passed long before, a porter told him, and there was nothing that night but the late and dear express. For this Thomas had not enough money in addition to what would be required to buy off Jacob, so he had no help for it but to go home. This he did with a heart heavy enough. Well did he know that ere he could reach Birmingham to-morrow he would be too late. Recruiting sergeants do not linger at their work, especially after the army had been reduced by war and disease as it then had been in the Crimea. Before ten o'clock next morning Jacob, still dazed with yesterday's unwonted debauch, was sworn in before a Birmingham J.P., and not all the money his father possessed could then release him. Henceforth, till his years of service were out, he must go and kill or be killed at the bidding of these "sovereigns and statesmen," whose business it still, alas, is to make strife in the world.

This untoward event was in many ways a knock-down blow to the old labourer and his wife. She, however, sorrowed mostly on personal grounds, and dwelt on gloomy prospects of wounds and violent deaths as the only lot now open for her son--bone of her bone, and flesh of her flesh--whom she had nursed and tended from the womb only for this. Like a good housewife, she mourned also the loss of Jacob's wages, which not only helped to keep the wolf from the door, but also served to nourish the hope that one day all might yet see the new land of promise. If any savings could be pointed to they were always in the mother's eyes due to those wonderful earnings of her boy's.

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