Country Life
Horse and Scythe Days A revived interest in rural crafts is -very evident, and is very well directed by the Bureau of Rural industries, who issue an admirable and very modest Quarterly from their offices at. 6 Bayley Street, W.C. 1. It is perhaps further evidence of revival that more solid literature is also being published. Sturt's little classic, The Wheeboright s Shop, which is both autobiography and history, has just been reissued by the Cambridge University Press ; and is there in existence any richer mine of the lore of country crafts than Change in the Farm, written and illustrated in line drawings by T. Hennell and published (at 10s. 6d.) by the same publishers ? The book is entirely delightful. The substance far transcends the title, but one of the changes on the farm that has most impressed many of us who go back to the horse and scythe days, so to speak, is the present refusal to understand the machines that are in use. Manu- facturers—as in one particular case within my knowledge— dare not send out the machines they wished to sell and the farmers wished to use because they knew that careless and incapable hands would ill-use them, and therefore give the machine a bad name. I walked over a small farm this week and found four moderately new machines left in the open field just where they were last used five or six months ago, all rotted and rusted by the weather.
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