Page:The Life of the Fields, Jefferies, 1884.djvu/233

219 so very distant in these days of railways, if distance be measured by miles. London and London news is familiar enough—they talk of London and of the United States or Australia, but particularly of the United States. The Continent does not exist to them; but the United States is a sort of second home, and the older men who have not gone sigh and say, "If I had 'a emigrated, now you see, I should 'a done well."

There must be an immense increase in the number of papers passing through country post-offices. That the United States papers do come there is no doubt, for they are generally taken up by the cottage people to the farmhouses to show where the young fellows are who have left the place. But the remarkable fact is not in the increase of the papers, but in the growth of the desire to read them—the demand of the country for something to read.

In cottages of the better sort years ago you used to find the most formal of old prints or col oured pictures on the walls, stiff as buckram, unreal, badly executed, and not always decent. The favourites now are cuttings from the Illustrated London News or the Graphic, with pictures from which many cottages in the farthest away of the far country are hung round. Now and then one may be entered which is perfectly papered with such illustrations. These pictures in themselves play no inconsiderable part in educating the young, whose eyes become accustomed to correct representations of scenes in distant places, and who learn as much about such places and things as they could do without personally going. Besides which, the picture being found there is evidence that at