Page:The Life of the Fields, Jefferies, 1884.djvu/232

218 lambing season, when the east wind blows and he needs shelter, is sure to have a scrap of newspaper with him to pore over in the hollow of the windy downs. In summer he reads in the shade of the firs while his sheep graze on the slope beneath. The little country stations are often not stations at all in the urban idea of such a convenience, being quite distant from any town, and merely gathering together the traffic from cross-roads. But the porters and men who work there at times get a good many newspapers, and these, after looking at them themselves, they take or send up to their relatives in the village ^ye or six miles away. Everybody likes to tell another the news; and now that there is such a village demand for papers, to pass on a paper is like passing the news, and gives a pleasure to donor and recipient.

So that papers which in days gone by would have stopped where they first arrived now travel on and circulate. If you had given a cottager a newspaper a few years since he would have been silent and looked glum. If you give him one now he says, "Thank you," briskly. He and his read anything and everything; and as he walks beside the waggon he will pick up a scrap of newspaper from the roadside and pore over it as he goes. Girls in service send home papers from London; so do the lads when from home—and so many are away from home now. Papers come from Australia and America; the latter are especial favourites on account of the oddities with which the editors fill the corners. No one ever talks of the Continent in agricultural places; you hear nothing of France or Germany; nothing of Paris or Vienna, which are not