New hats and jackets, but the same old faces. A stout old farmer sat at
the side of his barn door on the hatch leaning against the post. His body
was as rotund as a full sack of wheat, his great chin and his great
checks were full; a man very solidly set as it were, and he eyed me, a
stranger, as I passed down the lane, with mistrust and suspicion in every
line of his face. Out of the hunting season a stranger might perhaps have
been seen there once in six months, and this was that once. The British
bull-dog growled in his countenance--very likely pleasantness itself to
those he knew, grimness itself to others. The sunlight fell full into the
barn, the great doors wide open; there were sacks on the other side of
the door piled up inside, a heap of grain, and two men turning the
winches of a winnowing machine. New hats, but old faces. Could his
great-great-grandfather have been dug up and set in that barn door, he
would have looked just the same, so would the sacks, and the wheat, and
the sunshine. At the market town, where the auctioneer's hammer goes tap
tap over bullocks and sheep, crowds of men gather together,--farmers, and
bailiffs, and shepherds, drovers and labourers--and their clothes are
different, but there are the same old weather-beaten faces. Faces that
you may see in the ancient illuminated manuscripts, in the realistic wood
engravings of early printed books, in the etchings of last century, the
same lines and expression. The earth has marked them all.
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