It was a post as valued as a civil
list pension nowadays, for you see there were crowds of men in these corn
villages, but only a few of them could get barns to snop away in.
The flail is made of two stout staves of wood jointed with leather. They
had flails of harder make than that, harder than the iron nails used in
the wars of old times, _i.e._ Hunger, Necessity, Fate, to beat them on
the back, and thresh them on the floor of the earth. The corn laws are
gone, half the barns are gone, our granaries now are afloat, steam
threshes our ricks--in a few days doing what used to take months, and you
would think that this simple implement would have disappeared for ever.
Instead of which flails are still in use on small farms--which it is now
the cry to multiply--for knocking out little quantities of grain for
feeding purposes. The gleaners used to use them to thresh out their
collections. There would be no difficulty in getting a flail if anybody
had a mind to make a museum of such things; and if the force of modern
ideas should succeed in dividing the land among small occupiers, the
flail will become as common as ever.
There was an old waggon shown at the Royal Agricultural Show in London
said to be two hundred years old; probably it had had so many new wheels,
and shafts, and sides, as to have physiologically changed its
constitution--still there were waggons in those days, and there are
waggons now. Express trains go by in a great hurry--the slow waggons
gather up the warm hay and the yellow wheat, just as they did hundreds of
years since.
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