: It Is Never Too Late to Mend by Reade Charles - Great Britain Social conditions 19th century Fiction

@FreeBooksTue 06 Jun, 2023

Posted in: #FreeBooks #FreeBooksIndia #FreeBooksApp #gg

Vote Up Vote Down

IT IS NEVER TOO LATE TO MEND

This attempt at a solid fiction is, with their permission, dedicated to the President, Fellows, and demies of St. Mary Magdalen College. Oxford, by a grateful son of that ancient, learned, and most charitable house.

George Fielding cultivated a small farm in Berkshire.

This position is not so enviable as it was. Years ago, the farmers of England, had they been as intelligent as other traders, could have purchased the English soil by means of the huge percentage it offered them.

But now, I grieve to say, a farmer must be as sharp as his neighbors, or like his neighbors he will break. What do I say? There are soils and situations where, in spite of intelligence and sobriety, he is almost sure to break; just as there are shops where the lively, the severe, the industrious, the lazy, are fractured alike.

This last fact I make mine by perambulating a certain great street every three months, and observing how name succeeds to name as wave to wave.

George Fielding was all these, who, a few years ago, assisted by his brother William, filled "The Grove"--as nasty a little farm as any in Berkshire.

Discontented as he was, the expression hereinbefore written would have seemed profane to young Fielding, for a farmer's farm and a sailor's ship have always something sacred in the sufferer's eyes, though one sends one to jail, and the other the other to Jones.

It was four hundred acres, all arable, and most of it poor sour land. George's father had one hundred acres grass with it, but this had been separated six years ago.

There was not a tree, nor even an old stump to show for this word "Grove."

But in the country oral tradition still flourishes.

There had been trees in "The Grove," only the title had outlived the timber a few centuries.

Free books android app tbrJar TBR JAR Read Free books online gutenberg

Login to post a comment!