tickled with a hoe laughs back with a harvest"
—and where every settler's shanty is
another stone added to the great temple of
civilisation—these outlying farms of England
are of no general value, and surely of no special
gain. They are simply concerns in which
money is laid out at one per cent instead of
at five or ten, and hardly wrought for, even at
such a per-centage. I have always a feeling of
wonder and admiration for the heroism which
can devote itself to this ungrateful cultivation.
The hungry crops laid year after year by the
storms that ever seem to quite leave the
uplands, or if not laid, then left to rot in the
winter snow for want of sun to ripen for the
gathering; the beasts that perish in the bleak
winters or the wet springs; the lambs that
are lost on the fells, that perish of hunger
crag-fast, or are dashed down the precipice,
perhaps storm-driven, perhaps hunted by the
hill foxes or masterless dogs, wandering loose;
the painful, toilsome living that is got between
the starved land and the inclement seasons;
and yet the farmer toils on, content if he can
manage his rent and the children's porridge,
and thinking he has gained all a son of Adam
needs to enable him to sing Nunc dimittis for his
own part, if he can be buried free of expense
to the parish. I have often grieved over these
dry sticks of our Cumberland farms; but I
suppose they are in some mysterious way
necessary to the nation. There must be fringes
everywhere—gradations and shadings, and the
lines of demarcation blurred and softened, and
links between right and left of varying sizes;
and so with farms as with man—beasts and
sheep standing in the place of vices, and
barley and wheat representing social circumstances.

There is much watering of dry sticks among
the young in the time of love-making; among
the old, too, for the matter of that: that time
never being quite sure as to its limitations,
being prolonged or curtailed with an irregularity
distracting to statisticians. How many
hearts grow only dry sticks for the garden of
love! Not, perhaps, all dry sticks—there may
be a central clump of blooming May blossom for
the one who can find his way; while for all others
there are only palisadings of dry wood which
no watering, even with the heart's best blood,
can make alive. It is of no use trying! Nature
is obstinately shut up; the sap will not
rise, and the gardener's care is of no avail.
When the irremediable mistake of a marriage
has been made, and the dry sticks have been
enclosed by a ring fence which only death can
destroy, then the miserable gardener wakes to
the consciousness of the hopeless labour lying
in striving to make park palings into flowering
trees—then he, or, it may be more unhappily,
she, knows the last agony of the soul when life
is coupled with death, till the eternal death
unchains them. The first wisdom of all who are
seeking matrimony and the ring fence, is to
prove whether their saplings have roots and
are living, or whether they are merely dry
sticks, incapable of growth and beauty. No
question is so important: neither money, nor
family, nor even health—next to the vitality of
love the most needful of all things to prove
strictly. But even sickness, like poverty, like
vulgar relations, can be endured where there is
real love; while, without that love, gold loses its
brightness, and health its charm, and strength
is no better than weakness, and sorrow sits
for ever in the place of joy. For as nature
without the rain and the dew—nature,
parched into an illimitable Sahara, and peopled
with wild beasts only—so is marriage without
love!

There is much watering of dry sticks in
minor matters, mainly noticeable in families,
where dry sticks chiefly abound. It is watering
a dry stick when a warm nature seeks to
kindle up a stolid to enthusiasm or to poetry;
it is watering a dry stick when a caressing
mouth seeks to relax a "stiff upper lip" into
gracious curves; the endeavour to make
obstinacy pliant, to convince folly by force of
reason, to win freedom from the domineering
man, or woman, whose softest mood means
playing Providence to every one's needs, real
or fancied, to get generosity from a churl, or
candour from a knave—all these are so many
watering-pots used in the horticulture of dry
sticks: with what result let common sense and
experience say! Strength put forth in the
attempts to revivify dead faiths and obsolete
philosophies is again an example of dry stick
watering, and by no means an uncommon one.
So is the study of prophecy, both before and
after the event. So is the expectation that
humanity will live up to idealising laws fit for
Utopia or Eden, but not for a sinful world,
where women are weak and men are wicked.
So again is the making of these idealising laws,
Maine or otherwise. So are nine-tenths of the
missionary enterprises; and so ninety-nine hundredths
of the propagandism of all kinds always
going on, whatever the distinctive appellation
attached. So are many learned societies—
Heaven save the mark!—which pluck one little
fluttering twig off the great tree of life, and
descant on that as if it were root and bole and
branches, all complete. So is much of that
"burning zeal" which passes under the name
of energy, but which is simply fussiness and
the whirr of misdirected power—setting chariot-
wheels to hand-barrows, and driving golden
ploughs over sea-sands. It is pitiable, indeed,
to think how much of the work going on in
the world is merely the watering of dry sticks,
and how people cling to these dry sticks as to
living trees, pitching their tents beneath them
as complacently as if they were encamped beneath
the cedars of Lebanon, or the vineyards of
Italy. There is a glamour in these dead woods
greater than that which filled the enchanted forest
of Oberon, and no human power can show the
bewitched indwellers the true form of the dead
things they nurture so tenderly, and water so
unceasingly. You may try, but you will not
succeed. One by one you may pluck up those