Mr. Hill and I were growing very chummy. A faint uncomfortable distrust of me, which I suspected through the first two days, had wholly disappeared. We talked with perfect freedom now and with a growing liking for each other, which, for me, added vastly to the charm of those six days on the farm. I tried at first to lead the talk, and to draw Mr. Hill into expressions of his views of life, that I might learn his attitude toward modern progress, and catch glimpses of the growth of things from his point of view. But Mr. Hill was proof against such promptings. He was a shrewd, practical farmer, with a masterful hold upon all the details of his enterprise, and with a mind quickened by thrifty conduct of his own affairs to a catholic taste for information. His schooling had been limited, he said, but he must have meant his actual school training; for life itself had been his school, and admirably had he improved its advantages. He was a trained observer and a close student of actual events. Instead of my getting him to talk, he made me talk, but with so natural a force as to rob it of all thought of compulsion. The talk drifted early into politics, and I soon found that my light-hearted generalizations would not pass muster. Back and back he would press me upon the data of each induction, until I was forced to tell what I knew, or was confronted with my ignorance. And then he delighted in talk of other people than our own, and his knowledge of a somewhat general contemporaneous history was curiously varied and accurate. Stories of succeeding English ministries, and even of the short-lived French cabinets, were ready to his use, and he tactfully righted me in my errors. But he held me closest to my memories of things among the common people, the agricultural laborers in England, and their relation to the farmers, and theirs in turn to the landed proprietors, and the promise which the land could give of continued support to three classes, under the changed conditions of modern life. All that I could remember of a typical laborer's home, and of its manner of life, and of the general aspect of an English farm, seemed only to whet his appetite, and to strengthen his demand for what I knew of the continental peasantry. His interest centred strongly in the French, and there was plainly a peculiar charm for him in every detail which I could give of the French farmers, with their small holdings, and their inherited habits of thrift, and of the close culture of their lands. But he would even lead me on to speak of great cities, and of the life in them of the rich and poor, and of any signs, of which I knew, of growing social discontent. And with an interest that never flagged, he questioned me on works of art; and followed patiently, and with a zest that warmed one's own enthusiasm, through endless churches, and long dim galleries, and by narrow, crooked streets of a modern city to the ruins of its distant past. And