COUNTRY LIFE
Good English
It has been my good fortune lately to talk daily with an agricultural labourer of the old type. He is 70 and looks 60. He is no great scholar. He has spent all his life on the land. If your speech were complicated at all he would probably fail to understand you, but he talks more perfect English than any man of my acquaintance. "The maids wished me to dig the bed a little nigher this way." "it is the valley springs that feed the river." "I'll put it in the shed where I can lay my hands 9n it any time." After telling him which bit of land to trench or "double dig," as he says, I went to London and heard a clerk, going to the same place, say to his neighbour about some extinct thing : "It's absolutely non est." Doubtless he is a bit of a scholar in his way ; but the old labourer would have said : "The place of it is no more seen," or used some similar Saxon idiom preserving for us till today the English that once was. Are the habits of thought, the essential wisdom of the two types, at all like their speech, I wonder ? However that' may be, there is nothing like the vernacular, even though it be a comparatively late vernacular. *
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