These plays are very simple plays. With one exception, “The New Year,” they rest for their effects upon dialogue rather than upon dramatic action or plot. There is nothing harrowing, problematical, or pathological about any of them. The stories are as simple, obvious and naïve, and have the same happy endings as those which the folk delight to sing about in their own songs, and from which, indeed, judging by the titles she has given to her plays, the author drew her inspiration. It will be noticed that Lady Darwin has eliminated dialect from the speech which she has put into the mouths of her characters. This is not because the English villager has no vernacular of his own—there are as many dialects in England as there are counties—but because dialect, as no doubt Lady Darwin knew full well, is not of the essence of speech. It is the way in which language is used for the purpose of expression, the order in which words are strung together, the subtle, elusive turns of speech, the character of its figures and metaphors, rather than local peculiarities of intonation and pronunciation, which betray and illumine character. And it is upon these, the essential characteristics of speech, that the author of these plays has wisely and, for the most part, wholly, relied to give life and character to the actors of her dramas. The results she has achieved by these means is nothing less than amazing. So accurately has she caught the peculiar inflections, the inversions, the curious meanderings and involutions of peasant speech, so penetrating—uncanny at times—is her insight into the structure and working of the peasant mind, that, did one not know that this was scarcely the fact, one would have been tempted to suspect that the author had herself been born and bred in a country village and lived all her days amongst those whose characters and habits of mind she has described with such fidelity. Take, for instance, the lesson on courtship which My Man John gives to his master—is not the actual phrasing almost photographic in its accuracy? Note, too, the frequent use of homely metaphor:— ’Tis with the maids as ’tis with the fowls when they be come out from moult. They be bound to pick about this way and that in their new feathers. I warrant she be gone shy as a May bettel when ’tis daylight. Ah, you take and let her go quiet, same as I lets th’ old mare when her first comes up from grass. I likes doing things my own way, mother. Womenfolk, they be so buzzing. ’Tis like a lot of insects around of any one on a summer’s day. A-saying this way and that—whilst a man do go at everything quiet and calm-like. and the following typical sentences:— Well, mother, I count I’m back a smartish bit sooner nor what you did expect.