This is the reason of the vitality of Our Tillage; it was simple, natural, and reflected the author herself, her tender human heart, her impulsive nature, her bright playful humorous spirit.  There is no thought, no mind stuff in it, and it is a classic!  It is about the country, and she has so little observation that it might have been written in a town, out of a book, away from nature’s sights and sounds.  Her rustic characters are not comparable to those of a score or perhaps two or three score of other writers who treat of such subjects.  The dialogue, when she makes them talk, is unnatural, and her invention so poor that when she puts in a little romance of her own making one regrets it.  And so one might go on picking it all to pieces like a dandelion blossom.  Nevertheless it endures, outliving scores of in a way better books on the same themes, because her own delightful personality manifests itself and shines in all these little pictures.  This short passage describing how she took Lizzie, the little village child she loved, to gather cowslips in the meadows, will serve as an illustration.

They who know these feelings (and who is so happy as not to have known some of them) will understand why Alfieri became powerless, and Froissart dull; and why even needlework, the most effective sedative, that grand soother and composer of women’s distress, fails to comfort me today.  I will go out into the air this cool, pleasant afternoon, and try what that will do. . . .  I will go to the meadows, the beautiful meadows and I will have my materials of happiness, Lizzie and May, and a basket for flowers, and we will make a cowslip ball.  “Did you ever see a cowslip ball, Lizzie?” “No.”  “Come away then; make haste! run, Lizzie!”

And on we go, fast, fast! down the road, across the lea, past the workhouse, along by the great pond, till we slide into the deep narrow lane, whose hedges seem to meet over the water, and win our way to the little farmhouse at the end.  “Through the farmyard, Lizzie; over the gate; never mind the cows; they are quiet enough.”  “I don’t mind ’em,” said Miss Lizzie, boldly and’ truly, and with a proud affronted air, displeased at being thought to mind anything, and showing by her attitude and manner some design of proving her courage by an attack on the largest of the herd, in the shape of a pull by the tail.  “I don’t mind ’em.”  “I know you don’t, Lizzie; but let them, alone and don’t chase the turkey-cock.  Come to me, my dear!” and, for wonder, Lizzie came.

In the meantime my other pet, Mayflower, had also gotten into a scrape.  She had driven about a huge unwieldy sow, till the animal’s grunting had disturbed the repose of a still more enormous Newfoundland dog, the guardian of the yard.

The beautiful white greyhound’s mocking treatment of the surly dog on the chain then follows, and other pretty scenes and adventures, until after some mishaps and much trouble the cowslip ball is at length completed.