.COUNTRY LIFE
LAST week I overheard a conversation between two farmers in the bar parlour of an ancient hotel in Lewes. The setting was a relic of that Dickens-cum-Washington Irving picture of England which is so rapidly being replaced by streamline and chromium. The heavy, carved beams of the ceiling were hung with pewter pots ; sideboards were set with silver and electroplate coffee-pots, salvers, basins and punch-servers; the walls, nicely seasoned by the smoke from a vast open hearth, were decorated with sporting prints and old playbills. The whole house was fragrant with the smell of meat-pie and jolly-good-ale.
I pricked up my ears when I heard one farmer say, with that' sly allusiveness which is the characteristic method of bucolic approach to any theme involving money, " What d'you think of this.Gov'ment promise of a guaranteed minimum of sixty-five pounds on flax ? " The second farmer obviously thought well of it, and the conversation proceeded into technicalities of soil problems in connection with the matter. The con- clusion was that it would be worth while to put down a little flax. I found this most satisfactory from my point of vied, an unashamedly aesthetic one, for the beauty of a field of flax is distinctive. It contrasts with the ample corn, the solid meadow, bringing to the countryside a touch of grace. The wind takes it differently, setting it shivering so that the whole field trembles like shaken lace, while the blossom, negligible perhaps, but as a mass accumulating a sub-tint of delicate Cambridge blue, is half-submerged below the fibrous green.
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