There is a life in the villages and hamlets around, in the little places that are not even hamlets, which to the folk who dwell in them is fully as important as that of the greatest city.  Farmhouses are not like the villas of cities and city suburbs.  The villa has hardly any individuality; it is but one of many, each resembling the other, and scarcely separated.  To-day one family occupies it, tomorrow another, next year perhaps a third, and neither of these has any real connection with the place.  They are sojourners, not inhabitants, drawn thither by business or pleasure; they come and go, and leave no mark behind.  But the farmhouse has a history.  The same family have lived in it for, perhaps, a hundred years:  they have married and intermarried, and become identified with the locality.  To them all the petty events of village life have a meaning and importance:  the slow changes that take place and are chronicled in the old newspaper have a sad significance, for they mark that flux of time which is carrying them, too, onwards to their rest.

These columns of the file, therefore, that to a stranger seem a blank, to the old folk and their descendants are like a mirror, in which they can see the faces of the loved ones who passed away a generation since.  They are the archives of the hamlets round about:  a farmer can find from them when his grandfather quitted the old farm, and read an account of the sale.  Men who left the village in their youth for the distant city or the still more distant colonies, as they grow in years often feel an irresistible desire to revisit the old, old place.  The home they so fondly recollect is in other hands, and yet in itself but little changed.  A few lines in the plainest language found in the file here tell to such a greybeard a story that fills his eyes with tears.  But even a stranger who took the trouble to turn over the folios would now and then find matter to interest him:  such as curious notes of archaeological discovery, accounts of local customs now fallen into disuse, and traditions of the past.  Many of these are worthy of collection in more accessible form.

There is hardly anything else in the room except the waste basket under the table.  As the visitor enters, a lad goes out with a roll of manuscript in his hand, and the editor looks up from his monotonous task of proof-reading, for he has that duty also to perform.  Whatever he is doing, some one is certain to call and break off the thread of his thought.  The bailiff or farm-steward of a neighbouring estate comes in to insert an advertisement of timber for sale, or of the auction of the ash-poles annually felled.  A gamekeeper calls with a notice not to sport or trespass on certain lands.  The editor has to write out the advertisement for these people, and for many of the farmers who come, for countrymen have the greatest dislike to literary effort of any kind, and can hardly be persuaded to write a letter.  Even when they have written the letter they get the