 Wallingford. But, what was more
interesting to us, he had detailed record of the period of the change to the
present state of things, and told us a great deal about it, and especially of
that exodus of the people from the town to the country, and the gradual recovery
by the town-bred people on one side, and the country-bred people on the other,
of those arts of life which they had each lost; which loss, as he told us, had
at one time gone so far that not only was it impossible to find a carpenter or a
smith in a village or small country town, but that people in such places had
even forgotten how to bake bread, and that at Wallingford, for instance, the
bread came down with the newspapers by an early train from London, worked in
some way, the explanation of which I could not understand. He told us also that
the townspeople who came into the country used to pick up the agricultural arts
by carefully watching the way in which the machines worked, gathering an idea of
handicraft from machinery; because at that time almost everything in and about
the fields was done by elaborate machines used quite unintelligently by the
labourers. On the other hand, the old men amongst the labourers managed to teach
the younger ones gradually a little artizanship, such as the use of the saw and
the plane, the work of the smithy, and so forth; for once more, by that time it
was as much as - or rather, more than - a man could do to fix an ash pole to a
rake by handiwork; so that it would take a machine worth a thousand pounds, a
group of workmen, and half a day's travelling, to do five shillings' worth of
work. He showed us, among other things, an account of a certain village council
who were working hard at all this business; and the record of their intense
earnestness in getting to the bottom of some matter which in time past would
have been thought quite trivial, as, for example, the due proportions of alkali
and oil for soap-making for the village wash, or the exact heat of the water
into which a leg of mutton should be plunged for boiling - all this joined to
the utter absence of anything like party feeling, which even in a village
assembly would certainly have made its appearance in an earlier epoch, was very
amusing, and at the same time instructive.
    This old man, whose name was Henry Morsom, took us, after our meal and a
rest, into a biggish hall
