Up at The Idovers, as his place was called, a lonely homestead on a plain between the Downs, they used to assemble, and at once put up the shutters, whether it was dark or not, not wishing to know whether it was day or night. Sometimes the head carter would venture in for instructions, and be gruffly told to take his team and do so and so. 'Eez, zur,' he would reply, 'uz did thuck job isterday.' His master had ordered him to do it the day before, but was oblivious that twenty-four hours had passed. The middle-aged men stood this continuous drinking without much harm, their constitutions having become hardened and 'set,' but it killed off numbers of the younger men.
They drank ale principally—strong ale, for at that time in lonely farmhouses they were guiltless of wines and spirits. But the enormous price of 50l. per load suggested luxuries, and it was old Jonathan at The Idovers who introduced gin. Till then no gin even—nothing but ale—had been consumed in that far-away spot; but Jonathan brought in the gin, which speedily became popular. He called it 'spoon-drink' (a spoon being used with the sugar) as a distinguishing name, and as spoon-drink accordingly it was known. When any one desired to reduce the strength of his glass, they did indeed pour him out some more water from the kettle; but having previously filled the kettle with the spirit, his last state became worse than the first.
While thus they revelled, the labourers worked with the flails in the barn threshing out the truly golden grain. The farmers used to take pains to slip round upon them unexpectedly, or meet them as they were going home from work, in order to check the pilfering of the wheat. The labourer was not paid wholly in cash; he had a bushel of the 'tail,' or second flour, from the mill in lieu of money, settling once a month. Their life was hard indeed. But the great prosperity which had come upon the farmers did them no good. In too many cases it melted away in drink. The habit of drinking became settled in a family. Bad habits endured after the prosperity had departed; and in some cases those who had once owned their farms as well as occupied them had to quit the homes of their forefathers. Here and there one, however, laid the foundation of a fortune, as fortunes are understood in the country; and shrewd old Jonathan was one of these.
Even down to very recent days a spell of drinking—simple drinking—was the staple amusement of many an otherwise respectable farmer. Not many years since it was not unusual for some well-to-do farmer of the old school to ride off on his nag, and not be heard of for a week, till he was discovered at a distant roadside inn, where he had spent the interval in straightforward drinking. These habits are now happily extinct. It was in those old times that wheat was bought and hoarded with the express object of raising the price to famine pitch: a thing then sometimes practicable, though not always successful. Thus in 1801 the price of wheat in March was 55l. per load, while in October it had fallen to 15l. Men forgot the misery of the poor in their eagerness for guineas.
Hilary, with all his old prejudices, was not so foolish as to desire a return of times like that. He had undergone privation himself in youth, for farmers' sons were but a little better off than plough-lads even in his early days; and he did not wish to make money by another man's suffering. Still he was always grieving about the wheat crop, and how it had fallen in estimation. It was a sight to see the gusto with which he would run his hand into a sack of wheat to sample it. 'Here, feel this,' he would say to me, 'you can slip your hand in up to your elbow; and now hold up your palm—see, the grains are as plump as cherry-stones.'
After hearing Hilary talk so much of old Jonathan I thought I should like to see the place where he had lived, and later in the season walked up on the hills for that purpose. The stunted fir-trees on the Down gave so little shadow that I was glad to find a hawthorn under whose branches I could rest on the sward. The prevalent winds of winter sweeping without check along the open slope had bent the hawthorn before them, and the heat of the sultry summer day appeared the greater on that exposed height. On either hand hills succeeded to hills, and behind I knew they extended farther than the eye could reach. Immediately beneath in front there was a plain, at its extreme boundary a wood, and beyond that the horizon was lost in the summer haze. Wheat, barley, and oats—barley and wheat and beans, completely occupied the plain. It was one vast expanse of cereals, without a sign of human life; for the reaper had not yet commenced, and the bailiffs' cottages were hidden among the ricks. There was an utter silence at noonday; nothing but yellowing wheat beneath, the ramparts of the hills around, and the sun above.
But, though out of sight, there was a farmhouse behind a small copse and clump of elms full of rooks' nests, a short way from the foot of the Down. This was The Idovers, once the residence of old Jonathan; it was the last farm before reaching the hill district proper, and from the slope here all the fields of which it consisted were visible. The house was small, for in those days farmers did not look to live in villas, and till within the last few years even the parlour floor was of stone flags. Rushes used to be strewn in the halls of palaces in ancient times, and seventy years ago old Jonathan grew his own carpets.
The softest and best of the bean straw grown on the farm was selected and scattered on the floor of the sitting-rooms as warm and dry to the feet, and that was all the carpet in the house. Just before sheep-shearing time, too, Jonathan used to have the nettles cut that flourished round the back of the sheds, and strewn on the floor of the barn. The nettles shrivelled up dry, and the wool did not stick to them, but could be gathered easily.
With his own hands he would carry out a quart of beans to the pigs—-just a quart at a time and no more, that they might eat every one and that none might be wasted. So, too, he would carry them a few acorns in his coat-pocket, and watch the relish with which the swine devoured their favourite food. He saved every bit of crooked wood that was found about the place; for at that date iron was expensive, and wood that had grown crooked and was therefore strong as well as curved was useful for a hundred purposes. Fastened to a wall, for instance, it did for a hook upon which to hang things. If an apple-tree died in the orchard it was cut out to form part of a plough and saved till wanted.
Jonathan's hard head withstood even the whirl of the days when corn was at famine prices. But these careful economies, this continual saving, put more money in his purse than all that sudden flush of prosperity. Every groat thus saved was as a nail driven into an oak, fixed and stable, becoming firmer as time went on. How strangely different the farmers of to-day, with a score of machines and appliances, with expensive feeding-stuffs, with well-furnished villas! Each one of Jonathan's beans in his quart mug, each one of the acorns in his pocket became a guinea.