But these are not all the spring-birds: there are the whinchats, fly-catchers, sandpipers, ring-ousels, and others that are occasional or rare. There is not a corner of the fields, woods, streams, or hills, which does not receive a new inhabitant; the sandpiper comes to the open sandy margins of the pool; the fly-catcher, to the old post by the garden; the whinchat, to the furze; the tree-pipit, to the oaks, where their boughs overhang meadow or cornfield; the sedge-reedling, to the osiers; the dove, to the thick hedgerows; the wheatear, to the hills; and I see I have overlooked the butcher-bird or shrike, as indeed in writing of these things one is certain to overlook something, so wide is the subject. Many of the spring-birds do not sing on their first arrival, but stay a little while; by that time, others are here. Grass blade comes up by grass blade till the meadows are freshly green; leaf comes forth by leaf till the trees are covered; and like the leaves, the birds gently take their places, till the hedges are imperceptibly filled.
BY MEAD AND STREAM.
BY CHARLES GIBBON.
CHAPTER XIV.—IN HARVEST-TIME.
Meanwhile the harvest-work on the lands of Ringsford Manor was progressing rapidly—to the surprise of the neighbours, who had heard that Mr Hadleigh could not obtain hands, owing to his craze about the beer question. He did not obtain much sympathy in the district in this attempted social revolution. It was known that he was not a teetotaler himself; and most of the proprietors and farmers and all the labourers took Caleb Kersey’s view, that apart from the question whether beer was good or bad for them, this autocratic refusal of it to those who preferred to have it was an interference with the liberty of the subject. As he passed through the market-place, a band of labourers had shouted in chorus the old rhyme: ‘Darn his eyes, whoever tries, to rob a poor man of his beer.’
But in spite of this determined opposition, here was a strong troop of men and women clearing the ground so fast that it looked as if the Ringsford cutting and ingathering would be completed as soon as that of any other farm. And the beer was not allowed on the field.
This was wonderful: but a greater wonder still was the fact that the hands who had been so swiftly brought together were working under Caleb Kersey himself—Caleb, the peasants’ champion, the temperance defender of every man’s right to get drunk if he liked! There were mutterings of discontent amongst his followers: there were whispers that he had been heavily bribed to desert their cause; and those who had previously deserted him, shook their heavy heads, declaring that they ‘knowed what was a-coming.’
‘It ain’t fair on him—he ain’t acting square by me,’ Jacob Cone, the Ringsford bailiff, had been heard to say in the Cherry Tree taproom. ‘He comes and he takes my place, and does whatever master wants, when I was a-trying to get master to let folk have their own way, as they’ve been allays ’customed to.’
That was Jacob’s first and last grumble; for Caleb, hearing of it, took him to every one of the hands, and each made the same statement:
‘We can do without the beer. We gave it up because we choose to, and not because we’re forced to.’