Page:The cry for justice - an anthology of the literature of social protest. - (IA cryforjusticea00sinc).pdf/90

 single fact struck him, perhaps, more deeply than any; it connected itself with many of his physiological fancies; it was the parent of many thoughts and plans of his after-*life. Here and there he could distinguish a half sentence. An old shrunken man opposite him was drawing figures in the spilt beer with his pipe-stem, and discoursing of the glorious times before the great war, "when there was more food than there were mouths, and more work than there were hands." "Poor human nature!" thought Lancelot, as he tried to follow one of those unintelligible discussions about the relative prices of the loaf and the bushel of flour, which ended, as usual, in more swearing, and more quarrelling, and more beer to make it up—"Poor human nature! always looking back, as the German sage says, to some fancied golden age, never looking forward to the real one which is coming!"

"But I say, vather," drawled out some one, "they say there's a sight more money in England now, than there was afore the war-time."

"Eees, booy," said the old man; "but it's got into too few hands."

"Well," thought Lancelot, "there's a glimpse of practical sense, at least." And a pedler who sat next him, a bold, black-whiskered bully from the Potteries, hazarded a joke—

"It's all along of this new sky-and-tough-it farming. They used to spread the money broad cast, but now they drills it all in one place, like bone-dust under their fancy plants, and we poor self-sown chaps gets none."

This garland of fancies was received with great applause; whereat the pedler, emboldened, proceeded to observe, mysteriously, that "donkeys took a beating, but horses kicked at it; and that they'd found out that in Stafford