CHANGE IN THE
VILLAGE

BY

GEORGE BOURNE

NEW YORK
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
1912

Printed in Great Britain by Billing & Sons, Ltd., Guildford, England

TO

MY SISTERS

CONTENTS

I

II

THE PRESENT TIME

III

THE ALTERED CIRCUMSTANCES

IV

THE RESULTING NEEDS

V

I

THE VILLAGE

I

THE VILLAGE

If one were to be very strict, I suppose it would be wrong to give the name of "village" to the parish dealt with in these chapters, because your true village should have a sort of corporate history of its own, and this one can boast nothing of the kind. It clusters round no central green; no squire ever lived in it; until some thirty years ago it was without a resident parson; its church is not half a century old. Nor are there here, in the shape of patriarchal fields, or shady lanes, or venerable homesteads, any of those features that testify to the immemorial antiquity of real villages as the homes of men; and this for a very simple reason. In the days when real villages were growing, our valley could not have supported a quite self-contained community: it was, in fact, nothing but a part of the wide rolling heath-country—the "common," or "waste," belonging to the town which lies northwards, in a more fertile valley of its own. Here, there was no fertility. Deep down in the hollow a stream, which runs dry every summer, had prepared a strip of soil just worth reclaiming as coarse meadow or tillage; but the strip was narrow—a man might throw a stone across it at some points—and on either side the heath and