A Little Conversation in Herefordshire There is a country house (as the English phrase goes) in the County of Hereford, at a little distance from the River Wye; the people who live in this house are very rich. They are not rich precariously, nor with doubts here and there, nor for the time, but in a solid manner; that is, they believe their riches to be eternal. Their income springs from very many places, of which they have not an idea; it is spent in a straightforward manner, which they fully comprehend. It is spent in relieving the incompetence--the economic incompetence--of all those about them; in causing wine to come into England from Ay, Vosne, Barsac, and (though they do not know it) from the rougher soil of Algiers. It also causes (does the way in which they exercise what only pedants call their Potential Demand) tea to be grown in Ceylon for their servants and in China for themselves, horses to be bred in Ireland, and wheat to be sown and most laboriously garnered in Western Canada, Ohio, India, South Russia, the Argentine, and other places. Also, were you to seek out every economic cause and effect, you would find missionaries living where no man can live, save by artifice, and living upon artificial supply in a strange climate by the strength of this Potential Demand rooted in the meadows of the Welsh March. Then, also, if you were to follow the places whence their wealth is derived, it would interest you very much. You would see one man earning so much in the docks and handing on a Saturday evening so much of his wages into their fund. You would see another clipping off cloth in Manchester and offering it to them, and another plucking cotton in Egypt and exchanging it, at their order, against something which they, not he, needed. Altogether you would see the whole world paying tithe, and a stream flowing into Hereford as into a reservoir, and a stream flowing out again by many channels. These good people were at dinner; upon the 5th of October, to be accurate. Parliament had not yet met, but football had begun, and there was shooting, also a little riding upon horses, though this is not to-day a popular amusement, and few will practise it. As for the women, one wrote and the other read--which was a fair division of labour; but the woman who wrote was not read by the woman who read, for the woman who wrote (and she was the daughter) preferred to write upon problems. But her mother, who did the reading, preferred what is called fiction, and Mr. Meredith was a favourite author of hers; but, indeed, she would read all fiction so only that it was in her native tongue.