there we restored the crumbling piles, until there stood clear to his imagination a vision of Imperial Rome, and his eyes kindled to some great general's triumph moving through the _Via Sacra_, and the people swarming to the very chimney-tops, their infants in their arms, and on the air the deep, rich moving roar of high acclaim! Sunday was the last day of my stay on the farm. When, in the middle of the week, I found that Mr. Hill was likely to keep me, I was conscience-stricken, because I had not told him that my stay would be short. He said nothing at first in reply to my announcement, but presently remarked that it was very hard to get men in that part of the country. "But, surely," I said, "more men apply to you for work than you can possibly employ." He looked at me with some wonder, at my ignorance. "For a long time I have been looking for a man to help me," he said. "I'm growing old, and I can't do the work that I once did. If I could find the right man, I'd keep him the year round, and pay him good wages. But the best young fellows go to the cities, and the rest are mostly a worthless lot. There's hardly a day in the year when I haven't a job for any decent man who'll ask for it. I have to go looking for men, and then I generally can't find one that's any account." This was much the longest speech that he had made to me so far, and a very interesting one I thought it, and I am only sorry that I cannot reproduce the exact phraseology, with its Anglo-Saxon words set, by an instinctive choice, into rugged sentences which admirably expressed the man. I waited hopefully for further speech from him, and at last it came, quite of its own accord; for I had given up trying to draw him out. We were sitting together on Sunday evening on the platform of the pump in front of the farm-house. It had been a very restful Sunday. In the morning I went to the village church, where two services followed each other in quick succession. The first was a prayer-meeting, attended by a little company of farming people and village folk, who conscientiously parted company at the door on the basis of sex, and sat on opposite sides of a central aisle.