“Through life’s dark road his sordid way he wends—­
      An incarnation of fat dividends “!

      C. SPRAGUE.

It is probable that the bicycle will cause a larger demand for remote country houses.  To the writer, who, previous to this summer, had never experienced the poetry of motion which a bicycle coasting downhill, with a smooth road and a favourable wind, undoubtedly constitutes, the invention seems of the greatest utility.  It brings places sixty miles apart within our immediate neighbourhood.  Let the south wind blow, and we can be at quaint old Tewkesbury, thirty miles away, in less than three hours.  A northerly gale will land us at the “Blowing-stone” and the old White House of Berkshire with less labour than it takes to walk a mile.  Yet in the old days these twenty miles were a great gulf fixed between the Gloucestershire natives and the “chaw-bacons” over the boundary.  Their very language is as different as possible.  To this day the villagers who went to the last “scouring of the horse” and saw the old-fashioned backsword play, talk of the expedition with as much pride as if they had made a pilgrimage to the Antipodes.

As September draws nigh and the days rapidly shorten, the merry hum of the thrashing machine is heard all day long.  The sound comes from the homestead across the road, and buzzes in my ears as I sit and write by the open window.  How wonderful the evolution of the thrashing machine!  How rough-and-ready the primitive methods of our forefathers!  First of all there was the Eastern method of spreading the sheaves on a floor of clay, and allowing horses and oxen to trample on the wheat and tread out the corn.  Not less ancient was the use of the old-fashioned flail—­an instrument only discarded within the memory of living man.  Yet what a wonderful difference there is between the work accomplished in a day with the flails and the daily output of the modern thrashing machine!

In the porch of the manor house, amid an accumulation of old traps and other curious odds and ends there hangs an ancient and much-worn flail.  Two stout sticks, the handstaff and the swingle, attached to each other by a strong band of gut, constitute its simple mechanism.  The wheat having been strewn on the barn floor, the labourer held the handstaff in both hands, swung it over his head, and brought the swingle down horizontally on to the heads of ripe corn.  Contrast this fearfully laborious process with the bustling, hurrying machine of to-day.  And yet with all this improvement the corn can scarcely be thrashed out at a profit.  So out of joint are the times and seasons that the foreigner is allowed to cut out the home producer.  Half the life of the country-side has gone, and no man dare whisper “Protection.”