It is not by any means so, fair ladies. It is only your newly adopted Father who tells you so. Suppose, learning what it is to be generous, you recover your descent from God, and then weave your household dresses white with your own fingers? For as no fuller on earth can white them, but the light of a living faith,—so no demon under the earth can darken them like the shadow of a dead one. And your modern English ‘faith without works’ is dead; and would to God she were buried too, for the stench of her goes up to His throne from a thousand fields of blood. Weave, I say,—you have trusted far too much lately to the washing,—your household raiment white; go out in the morning to Ruth’s field, to sow as well as to glean; sing your Te Deum, at evening, thankfully, as God’s daughters,—and there shall be no night there, for your light shall so shine before men that they may see your good works, and glorify—not Baal the railroad accident—but “L’Amor che muove il Sole, e l’altre stelle.” NOTES AND CORRESPONDENCE. I have had by me for some time a small pamphlet, “The Agricultural Labourer, by a Farmer’s Son,” [60] kindly sent me by the author. The matter of it is excellent as far as it reaches; but the writer speaks as if the existing arrangements between landlord, farmer, and labourer must last for ever. If he will look at the article on “Peasant Farming” in the ‘Spectator’ of July 4th of this year, he may see grounds for a better hope. That article is a review of Mr. W. T. Thornton’s “Plea for Peasant Proprietors;” and the following paragraph from it may interest, and perhaps surprise, other readers besides my correspondent. Its first sentence considerably surprises me to begin with; so I have italicized it:— “This country is only just beginning to be seriously roused to the fact that it has an agricultural question at all; and some of those most directly interested therein are, in their pain and surprise at the discovery, hurrying so fast the wrong way, that it will probably take a long time to bring them round again to sensible thoughts, after most of the rest of the community are ready with an answer. “The primary object of this book is to combat the pernicious error of a large school of English economists with reference to the hurtful character of small farms and small landed properties.... One would think that the evidence daily before a rural economist, in the marvellous extra production of a market garden, or even a peasant’s allotment, over an ordinary farm, might suffice to raise doubts whether vast fields tilled by steam, weeded by patent grubbers, and left otherwise to produce in rather a happy-go-lucky fashion, were likely to be the most advanced and profitable of all cultivated lands. On this single point of production, Mr. Thornton conclusively proves the small farmer to have the advantage.