that an employer is a tyrant and a curse to the country as I am afraid the rising generation in some cases are taught to believe. Among my cottage tenants is a woman whose father recently died at the age of eighty—a deaf old man of the old school. He had lived sixty years and I believe never slept out of the cottage which my grandfather built for him when he married, and showed me a rent receipt sixty years old with pride. He was a woodman, and one of the sort who never wanted overlooking, and who did, when working by day work, as much or nearly as much as when working by piece work. How different this is from many of the men nowadays whose one idea is to do as little as can possibly pass muster, and when at piece work scamp it as much as their employer will stand ! This constant struggle to get a fair day’s work for a fair day’s wage is one of the greatest curses, to my mind, of modern farming, but unpleasant as it is it seems to be a necessity of a business in which many operations daily occur which cannot be done by piece work. I must except shepherds, carters and cowmen from the class who have deteriorated, for though it is more and more difficult to get young men to take the places of the old ones, principally on account of the necessary Sunday work, the men who have charge of animals as a rule show as much and often more care for them than their masters. In the course of twenty-one years I have never once had to reprove or discharge a man or boy for cruelty to animals, and both carters and shepherds will take and even steal—though they, perhaps rightly, do not consider it theft—their master’s corn if they do not think the allowance is large enough.
It is curious how rapidly the Cotswold dialect is disappearing among the people. Even in the parish of Withington, which used to be celebrated for its broad West Country speech, you hardly hear a man who now talks as old Richard Stallard and others did in the days of my youth. I can remember two or three good stories illustrative of this dialect. There was a clergyman living here, a brother of the late celebrated entomologist Woollaston, who used to come and stay here to collect beetles, and gave the village boys coppers to bring him in specimens. He was a thin, hungry- looking man in appearance, and the story goes that some of the boys were overheard as follows; “A wonder what old Oolaston does with thai bittles?” “Well, a dunnow, but a suppose a yeats em, for a looks as though a meal of vittles was a strainger to he.”
Another is the letter of proposal written by a Withington swain to his intended, which ran as follows; “I Garge Perrot to thee Mary Ballinger. If thee be to me as I be to thee, name the day.” This is probably the most laconic love-letter on record, but I believe is literally true.
*****
October 14th (1896). Drove into Cirencester and on via Bibury to Sherborne to shoot partridges. From the Swan at Bibury, a village now well known from the work of my late friend Arthur Gibbs, I took a trap and was most ably driven by the buxom daughter of the innkeeper. The mill at Bibury is now closed and deserted like nearly all the country mills in this part of England, and I no longer know where to get a sack
