They quote poetry--sentimental maunderings, the humorous ditties of the lower-class music halls, or bloodthirsty, recounting how “Joe Golightly” “stabbed ’im in the spine.” They crack their little jokes, and score off each other and off themselves, when in the lowest depth of poverty--with nothing between them and ultimate destitution. When prosperity comes they share with each other, standing “treat” in “cawfee” and sardines and hard-boiled eggs. There fall down to them occasionally visitants from another world. Now it is a “gentleman” killing himself as speedily as possible with drink and sordid adventure, on the way between prosperity and death. Now it is a “benevolent idiot” desiring to see the “darker side of London life,” whose comments are received with marked disfavour by the normal members of the street. Now it is a revivalist or philanthropist seeking passionately to persuade them to return to the accepted ways of men. His efforts are useless. They have chosen their portion, and in that portion they will abide: drifting with all surrounding human lives, through their narrow space of being, towards whatever fate or fortune may offer them in that day when all days will have become as one day, and to-morrow joined with yesterday’s seven thousand years. CHAPTER VI THE COUNTRYSIDE Outside this exuberant life of the cities, standing aloof from it, and with but little share in its prosperity, stands the countryside. Rural England, beyond the radius of certain favoured neighbourhoods, and apart from the specialised population which serves the necessities of the country house, is everywhere hastening to decay. No one stays there who can possibly find employment elsewhere. All the boys and girls with energy and enterprise forsake at the commencement of maturity the life of the fields for the life of the town. A peasantry, unique in Europe in its complete divorce from the land, lacking ownership of cottage or tiniest plot of ground, finds no longer any attraction in the cheerless toil of the agricultural labourer upon scant weekly wages. In scattered feudal districts a liberal distribution of alms and of charity masquerading as employment may serve to retain a subservient population in a “model village.” When these hierarchies and generosities are absent the cottages crumble to pieces and are never repaired; no new cottages are constructed: the labourer loses not only intimacy with the land, but even all desire for the land; that longing for a particular position of his own which is the strongest animating force in the peasantry of every other country in the world. The villages are left to old men and to children, to the inert, unenterprising, and intellectually feeble. Whole ancient skilled occupations--hedging and ditching, the traditional treatment of beasts and growing things--are becoming lost arts in rural England. Behind the appearance of a feverish prosperity and adventure--motors along all the main roads,