“The work be Thine, the fruit Thy children’s part.”—Keble.

Look at Uphill Priors in the year 1880. Here are the mothers coming out of the mothers’ meeting. They look, in their neat hats and jackets, better on this week-day than any one would have done on Sunday sixty years ago. They are, many of them, the granddaughters, or grandsons’ wives, of the inhabitants in those old times; but they have not the worn, haggard faces that their parents had when far younger, except one or two poor things who have drunken husbands. Miss Carbonel (young Miss Carbonel) and the vicar’s wife have been working with them, and reading to them things that the Bettys and Nannys of those days would not have understood or cared for.

The white-haired lady, who stops her donkey-chaise to exchange some affectionate, kindly words, and give out a parcel or two—she is Miss Sophia; and those elderly women who cluster round for a greeting, they are her old scholars. Those black eyes are Hoglah’s; that neat woman is Judy! Yes, she has lived among them, and worked among them all her life, never forgetting that “no good work can be done without drudgery.” She has her Girls’ Friendly Society class still in her own little house, though she has dropped most of her regular out-of-door work of late years. For the vicar—there is a vicar now—and his daughters teach constantly in the schools. The children are swarming out now, orderly and nice, even superior in appearance to some of the mothers they run up to; and as to learning, the whole parish can read and write, and the younger ones can send out a letter that would be no disgrace to a lady or a gentleman.

There is a machine, with its long tail of spikes, coughing along as it blows off the steam at Farmer Goodenough’s. No one dreams of meddling with it to ............