The people who live in small villages, or in scattered habitations in the country, have certainly not so many _direct_ benefits from machinery as the inhabitants of towns. They have the articles at a cheap rate which machines produce, but there are not so many machines at work for them as for dense populations. From want of knowledge they may be unable to perceive the connexion between a cheap coat, or a cheap tool, and the machines which make them plentiful, and therefore cheap. But even they, when the saving of labour by a machine is a saving which immediately affects them, are not slow to acknowledge the benefits they derive from that best of economy. The Scriptures allude to the painful condition of the "hewers of wood" and the "drawers of water;" and certainly--in a state of society where there are no machines at all, or very rude machines--to cut down a tree and cleave it into logs, and to raise a bucket from a well, are very laborious occupations, the existence of which, to any extent, amongst a people, would mark them as remaining in a wretched condition. Immediately that the people have the simplest mechanical contrivance, such as the loaded lever, to raise water from a well, which is found represented in Egyptian sculpture, and also in our own Anglo-Saxon drawings, they are advancing to the condition of raising water by machinery. The oriental _shadoof_ is a machine. In our own country, at the present day, there are not many houses, in situations where water is at hand, that have not the windlass, or, what is better, the pump, to raise this great necessary of life from the well. Some cottagers, however, have no such machines, and bitterly do they lament the want of them. We once met an old woman in a country district tottering under the weight of a bucket, which she was labouring to carry up a hill. We asked her how she and her family were off in the world. She replied, that she could do pretty well with them, for they could all work, if it were not for one thing--it was one person's labour to fetch water from the spring; but, said she, if we had a pump handy, we should not have much to complain of. This old woman very wisely had no love of labour for its own sake; she saw no advantage in the labour of one of her family being given for the attainment of a good which she knew might be attained by a very common invention. She wanted a machine to save that labour. Such a machine would have set at liberty a certain quantity of labour which was previously employed unprofitably; in other words, it would have left her or her children more time for more profitable work, and then the family earnings would have been increased. [Illustration: Ancient Shadoof.]