"'Sixpence,' said Guido. 'It's quite a new one.'
"'And other things quite as silly,' the Wheat continued. 'All the time the flowers are flowering, but they will go, even the oaks will go. We think the reason you do not all have plenty, and why you do not do only just a little work, and why you die of hunger if you leave off, and why so many of you are unhappy in body and mind, and all the misery is because you have not got a spirit like the wheat, like us; you will not agree, and you will not share, and you will hate each other, and you will be so avaricious, and you will _not_ touch the flowers, or go into the sunshine (you would rather half of you died among the hard stones first), and you will teach your children hum, hum, to follow in some foolish course that has caused you all this unhappiness a thousand years, and you will _not_ have a spirit like us, and feel like us. Till you have a spirit like us, and feel like us, you will never, never be happy.'"
Was not that a fine talk for the child to have with the wheat-ear? And there is more of it, a great deal more in this story without an end which you will find in the book called "The Open Air."
Again, another boy--not Guido by any means, nor in the least like Guido--had been sent to gather acorns. He gathered a few, dropped them into his bag, and lay down in the warm corner by the root of the tree to sleep. There his grandmother found him, and there she beat him.
"A wickeder boy never lived: nothing could be done with the reprobate. He was her grandson--at least, the son of her daughter, for he was not legitimate. The man drank, the girl died, as was believed, of sheer starvation: the granny kept the child, and he was now between ten and eleven years old. She had done and did her duty, as she understood it. A prayer-meeting was held in her cottage twice a week, she prayed herself aloud among them, she was a leading member of the sect. Neither example, precept, nor the rod could change that boy's heart. In time perhaps she got to beat him from habit rather than from any particular anger of the moment, just as she fetched water and filled her kettle, as one of the ordinary events of the day. Why did not the father interfere? Because if so he would have had to keep his son: so many shillings a week the less for ale.