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Title: The Toilers of the Field

Author: Richard Jefferies

Release date: December 13, 2008 [eBook #27516]

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE TOILERS
OF THE FIELD ***

THE

Toilers of the Field

BY

RICHARD JEFFERIES
AUTHOR OF "THE GAMEKEEPER AT HOME," ETC. ETC.

NEW IMPRESSION

LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO.
39 PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON
NEW YORK AND BOMBAY
1898

All rights reserved

RICHARD JEFFERIES.

From the bust by Miss Margaret Thomas, in Salisbury Cathedral.
Photographed by Mr. Owen, Salisbury.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE.

First Edition, October 1892.
Reprinted, November 1892 and January 1893.
Issued in Silver Library, November 1893.
Reprinted, June 1898.

PREFACE.
The first and larger part of this volume, from which it takes its name,
consists of papers which will be new to the large majority of readers of
Richard Jefferies' works. The five entitled, "The Farmer at Home," "The
Labourer's Daily Life," "Field-faring Women," "An English Homestead,"
and "John Smith's Shanty," appeared in Fraser's Magazine in 1874, long
before Jefferies had gained any portion of that fame which was so long in
coming, and came in full measure too late. Of the three letters to the Times,
written in 1872, one was republished, with the permission of Mrs. Jefferies,
in an appendix to Mr. Walter Besant's "Eulogy of Richard Jefferies." It finds
its natural place in this volume with the other papers, which give so clear a
picture of the life of all classes of the cultivators of the soil in the early
seventies. The "True Tale of the Wiltshire Labourer" has never previously
been published, and is included in this volume by the kind permission of
Mr. G. H. Harmer of the Wilts and Gloucestershire Standard, for which
paper it was written when Jefferies was on its staff, but for some reason was
never used.
All the papers in Part II. have appeared in Longman's Magazine, since
Jefferies' death, and though they are with one exception very slight, yet they
are all characteristic specimens of his work. From internal evidence it
appears certain that the longest of them, entitled "The Coming of Summer,"
was written on June 1, 1881, and the subsequent days. It contains one or
two points of resemblance with the famous "Pageant of Summer," which
appeared in Longman's Magazine for June 1883. It was perhaps the first
study of which that paper is the finished picture.
The frontispiece is reproduced by kind permission of Mr. J. Owen of
Salisbury, from a photograph taken by him of Miss Thomas' bust of
Jefferies in Salisbury Cathedral.
C. J. LONGMAN.

CONTENTS.
PART I.

THE FARMER AT HOME

THE LABOURER'S DAILY LIFE

FIELD-FARING WOMEN

AN ENGLISH HOMESTEAD

JOHN SMITH'S SHANTY

WILTSHIRE LABOURERS (LETTERS TO THE "TIMES")
LETTER I
LETTER II
THE ALLOTMENT SYSTEM

A TRUE TALE OF THE WILTSHIRE LABOURER
CHAPTER II
CHAPTER III

PART II.

THE COMING OF SUMMER

THE GOLDEN-CRESTED WREN

AN EXTINCT RACE

ORCHIS MASCULA

THE LIONS IN TRAFALGAR SQUARE

PART I.

THE FARMER AT HOME.
The new towns, or suburbs which spring up every year in the
neighbourhood of London, are all built upon much the same plan. Whole
streets of houses present exact duplicates of each other, even to the number
of steps up to the front door and the position of the scraper. In the country,
where a new farmhouse is erected about once in twenty years, the styles of
architecture are as varied and as irregular as in town they are prim and
uniform. The great mass of farmhouses are old, and some are very
picturesque. There was a farmhouse I knew which was almost entitled to be
taken as the type of an English rural homestead. It was built at a spot where
the open wild down suddenly fell away into rich meadow land. Here there
was a narrow steep-sided valley, or "combe"—and at the mouth of this, well
sheltered on three sides from the north, the east, and north-eastern winds,
stood the homestead. A spring arose some way behind, and close to the
house widened into a pool which was still further enlarged by means of a
dam, forming a small lake of the clearest water. This lake fed a mill-race
lower down. The farmyard and rick-barton were a little way up the narrow
valley, on one side of which there was a rookery. The house itself was built
in the pure Elizabethan style; with mullioned windows, and innumerable
gables roofed with tiles. Nor was it wanting in the traditions of the olden
time. This fine old place was the homestead of a large farm comprising
some of the best land of the district, both down and meadow. Another
farmhouse, still used for that purpose, stands upon the wildest part of the
down, and is built of flint and concrete. It was erected nearly three hundred
years ago, and is of unusual size. The woodwork is all solid black oak, good
enough for an earl's mansion.
These are specimens of the highest class of farmhouse. Immediately
beneath them come the houses built in the early part of the present century.
They vary in almost every architectural detail, and the materials differ in
each county; but the general arrangement is the same. They consist as it
were of two distinct houses under one roof. The front is the dwelling-house
proper, usually containing a kitchen, sitting-room, and parlour. The back
contains the wood-house (coal-house now), the brewhouse—where the beer

was brewed, which frequently also had an oven—and, most important of
all, the dairy. All this part of the place is paved with stone flags, and the
dairy is usually furnished with lattice-work in front of the windows, so that
they can be left open to admit the cool air and not thieves. Coolness is the
great requisite in a dairy, and some gentlemen who make farming a science
go to the length of having a fountain of water constantly playing in it. These
houses, however, were built before scientific agriculture was thought of.
The wood-house contained the wood used for cooking and domestic
purposes; for at that date wood was universally used in the country, and
coal rarely seen. The wood was of course grown on the farm, for which
purpose those wide double mound hedges, now rapidly disappearing, were
made. It was considered a good arrangement to devote half-an-acre in some
outlying portion of the farm entirely to wood, not only for the fire, but for
poles, to make posts and rails, gates, ladders, &c. The coal could not in
those days be conveyed so cheaply as it now is by railways. Such as was
used had to be brought by the slow barges on the canals, or else was fetched
by the farmers' waggons direct from the pit-mouth. The teams were not
unfrequently absent two days and a night on the journey. In the outlying
districts this difficulty in obtaining coal practically restricted the available
fuel to wood. Now the wood-house is used as much for coal as wood. Of
course the great stacks of wood—the piles of faggots and logs—were kept
outside, generally in the same enclosure as the ricks, only a sufficient
number for immediate use being kept under cover. The brewhouse was an
important feature when all farmers brewed their own beer and baked their
own bread. At present the great majority purchase their beer from the
brewers, although some still brew large quantities for the labourers'
drinking in harvest time. At a period when comparatively little ready money
passed between employer and employed, and the payment for work was
made in kind, beer was a matter which required a great deal of the attention
of the farmer, and absorbed no little of his time. At this day it is a disputed
matter which is cheapest, to buy or to brew beer: at that time there was no
question about it. It was indisputably economical to brew. The brewhouse
was not necessarily confined to that use; when no brewing was in progress
it was often made a kind of second dairy. Over these offices was the cheese-
room. This was and still is a long, large, and lofty room in which the cheese
after being made is taken to dry and harden. It is furnished with a number of
shelves upon which the cheeses are arranged, and as no two can be placed

one on the other in the early stage of their maturing, much space is required.
It is the duty of the dairymaid and her assistant to turn these cheeses every
morning—a work requiring some strength. In this part of the house are the
servants' rooms. In front of the dairy and brewhouse is a paved court
enclosed with a wall, and in this court it was not uncommon to find a well,
or hog-tub, for the refuse of the dairy. Sometimes, but not often now, the
pig-stye is just outside the wall which surrounds the court. In this court, too,
the butter is generally churned, under a "skilling" which covers half of it.
Here also the buckets are washed, and other similar duties performed. The
labourers come here to receive their daily allowance of beer.
Most farmhouses in large arable farms were originally built so as to have a
small dairy at the back; though there was a time when the arable farmer
never thought of keeping a cow, and butter and cheese were unknown,
except as luxuries, in his establishment. This was during the continuance of
the Corn Laws, when everything was sacrificed to the one great object of
growing wheat. It was not impossible in those days to find a whole parish (I
know of one myself) in which there was not a single cow. Now the great
object is meat, then it was corn. But at the time when most of the
farmhouses were erected, the system of agriculture pursued was a judicious
mixture of the dairy and the cornfield, so that very few old farmhouses exist
which have not some form of dairy attached. In the corn-growing times,
most of the verdant meadows now employed to graze cattle, or for
producing hay, were ploughed up. This may be seen by the regular furrows,
unmistakable evidences of the plough. When corn declined in price through
the influx of foreign produce, the land was again laid down in grass, and
most of it continues so till this hour. It might be roughly estimated that
England now contains a third more meadow land than in the early part of
the present century, notwithstanding the attempt to plough up the downs.
We now come to the third class of farmsteads—low thatched buildings,
little better than large cottages, and indeed frequently converted into
dwellings for labourers. These are generally found on small farms, and in
districts where there are a number of small landed proprietors. These
freeholders built houses according to their means. In process of time they
were bought up by the great landowners, and the farms thrown together,
when the houses were used for other purposes. Some may still be found,
especially in dairy districts. In these the principal part of the house is

usually the dairy, which absorbs at least half of the ground floor, and opens
on the kitchen, in which the family sit, and in which their food is often
cooked. The eaves of the house are low, and there are scarcely any
appliances for comfort. The yeomen who originally lived in these places in
all respects resembled the labourers with whom they ate and drank and held
the most familiar intercourse. Their labourers even slept in the same
bedrooms as the family. But these men, though they mingled so freely with
the labourer, were his worst enemy. The little profit they made was entirely
accumulated by careful economy. They were avaricious and penurious to
the last degree, and grudged every halfpenny to the labouring man. They
were, and the remnant of them still are, the determined opponent of all
progress. The interior of some of these cottage-farmsteads, which still exist,
is almost Dutch-like in simplicity and homeliness. The fireplace is of a vast
size, fitted with antique iron dogs for burning wood, and on it swing the
irons to sustain the great pot. On each side, right under the chimney, are
seats, the ingle-nook of olden times. The chimney itself is very large, being
specially built for the purpose of curing sides of bacon by smoking. The
chimneypiece is ornamented with a few odd figures in crockery-ware, half-
a-dozen old brass candlesticks, and perhaps a snuff-box or tobacco dish.
The floor is composed of stone flags—apt to get slimy and damp when the
weather is about to change—and the wide chinks between them are filled
with hardened dirt. In the centre there is a piece of carpet on which the table
stands, but the rest of the room is bare of carpeting, except the hearth-rug.
The low window has a seat let into the wall under it. The furniture of the
apartment is utilitarian in the strictest sense. There is nothing there for
ornament or luxury, or even for ease; only what is absolutely necessary.
Generally there is a dresser, above which, on shelves, the dishes and plates
are arranged. A tall upright eight-day clock, with a brazen face, and an
inscription which tells that it was manufactured in a neighbouring village,
stands in one corner, and solemnly ticks in its coffin-like panelled case. On
each side of the fireplace there is an arm-chair, often cushioned with a fox
or badger skin, and a great brazen warming-pan hangs near the door. There
is no ceiling properly so called. These old houses were always built with a
huge beam, and you can see the boards of the floor above, which are merely
whitewashed. A fowling-piece, once a flint-lock, now converted to the
percussion cap system, hangs against the beam, and sometimes dried herbs
may be seen there too. The use of herbs is, however, going out of date. In

the evening when the great logs of wood smoulder upon the enormous
hearth and cast flickering shadows on the walls, revealing the cat
slumbering in the ingle-nook, and the dog blinking on the rug—when the
farmer slowly smokes his long clay pipe with his jug of ale beside him,
such an interior might furnish a good subject for a painter. Let the artist who
wishes to secure such a scene from oblivion set to work speedily, for these
things are fast fading away.
All these three classes of farmhouse are usually well supplied with
vegetables from the garden attached. The garden in fact was, and still is, an
object of considerable importance to the farmer, quite as much as the
allotment to the labourer. He reckons to receive from it his whole supply of
potatoes, cabbages, beans, peas, and other varieties of table vegetables, and
salads. These constitute an important item when there is a large family. I do
not speak now of the great farmers, although even these set some store by
such produce, but the middle class. It is usual in these gardens to grow
immense quantities of cabbage of a coarse kind, and also of lettuce, onions,
and radishes, all of which are freely given to the men and women working
on the place during the harvest. They are, in fact, grown especially for
them. At the dinner-hour one or more men of the number, deputed by the
rest, come up to the house. One carries the wooden bottles, or small barrels
of ale, which are handed out from the dairy. The other repairs to the garden,
and pulls up a reasonable quantity of lettuce, onions, or radishes, as the case
may be, from the patches indicated to him by the employer. These are then
washed in the court by the dairy, where there is almost always a pump, and
are then taken out to the men and shared amongst them. These salads make
an agreeable addition to the dry bread and cheese, or bacon. The custom is
an old one, and much to be commended. It costs the employer next to
nothing, and is an element in that goodwill which should exist between him
and the labourer.
On some farms large quantities of fruit are grown—such as gooseberries,
currants, plums, and damsons. Most have enough for their own use; some
sell a considerable amount. Outside the garden is the orchard. Some of
these orchards are very extensive, even in districts where cider is not the
ordinary beverage, and in a good apple year the sale of the apples forms an
important item in the peculiar emoluments of the farmer's wife. There are,
of course, many districts in which the soil is not adapted to the apple, but as

a rule the orchard is an adjunct of the garden. Some of the real old English
farmsteads possess the crowning delight of a filbert walk, but these are rare
now. In fact the introduction of machinery and steam, and the general
revolution which has been going on in agriculture, has gone far to sweep
away these more pleasant and home-like features of the farm. It becomes
daily more and more like a mere official residence, so to speak. The
peculiar home-like aspect of a farmhouse is gradually disappearing.
The daily life of the middle-class dairy farmer begins at five in the morning.
Rising about that hour, his first duty is to see that the men have all
appeared, and that they are engaged in milking the cows. He breakfasts at
six, or half-past, and the whole family have finished breakfast before seven.
By this time the day-labourers have come (the milkers are usually hired by
the year), and the master has to go out and put them on to their jobs.
Meantime the dairy is a scene of work and bustle; cheesemaking being in
full swing. This is at least superintended, if not partly performed, by the
mistress of the house. At larger farms it is the bailiff who rises early and
sees that the labourers are properly employed; and the cheesemaking is
entrusted to a dairymaid hired at high wages, who often combines with that
duty the office of general housekeeper. It was once the practice to rise even
earlier than five, but there are not many farmers who do so now. On the
arable farm, which is generally much larger, the master has almost always
got a bailiff, or head-carter, whom he can trust to see the men set to work.
The master is therefore not obliged to come down so soon, except at
important seasons. But the ordinary dairy-farm is not large enough to
support a bailiff, and the master has to rise himself. The fresh morning air
and the exercise give the farmer a tremendous appetite for breakfast. The
usual staple food consists of thick rashers of bacon only just "done," so as
to retain most of the fat, the surplus of which is carefully caught on slices of
bread. The town rasher is crisp, curled, and brown, without a symptom of
fat or grease. The farmer's early rasher is to a town eye but half-done,
bubbling with grease, and laid on thick slices of bread, also saturated with
the gravy. Sometimes cold bacon is preferred, but it is almost always very
fat. With this he drinks a pint or so of fairly strong beer, and afterwards has
a hunch of bread and butter and a cup or two of tea. He is then well fortified
for the labour of the morning. This is the common breakfast of the working-
farmer, who is as much a labouring man as any cottager on his farm, and

requires a quantity of solid food. Some, however, who are pretty well off,
and have a better idea of the luxuries of the table, regale themselves on
collared head, or rolled beef, or ham at breakfast. These hams are usually
preserved after a family receipt, and some of them are exquisite. After
breakfast the farmer walks round the place, watches the men at work for a
few minutes, and gives them instructions, and then settles himself down to
some job that requires his immediate superintendence. If it is hay-time he
takes a rake and works about the field, knowing full well all the difference
that his presence makes.
The agricultural labourers, both men and women, are a slow set, never in a
hurry; there is none of that bustle characteristic of the town people, even of
the lowest class. They take every opportunity of leaning upon the prong-
handle, or standing in the shade—they seem to have no idea of time.
Women are a sore trial to the patience of the agriculturist in a busy time. If
you want to understand why, go and ensconce yourself behind a hedge, out
of sight but in view of a field in which ten or twelve women are hoeing. By
and by a pedlar or a van comes slowly along the turnpike road which runs
past the field. At the first sound of footsteps or wheels all the bent backs are
straight in an instant, and all the work is at a standstill. They stand staring at
the van or tramp for five or six minutes, till the object of attention has
passed out of sight. Then there is a little hoeing for three or four
consecutive minutes. By that time one of them has remembered some little
bit of gossip, and stops to tell her nearest fellow-workwoman, and the rest
at once pause to listen. After a while they go on again. Now another vehicle
passes along the road, and the same process of staring has to be gone
through once more. If a lady or gentleman pass, the staring is something
terrific, and it takes quite ten minutes to discuss all the probabilities as to
who they were, and where they were going. This sort of thing goes on all
day, so that, in point of fact, they only do half a day's work. The men are not
so bad as this; but they never let slip an opportunity for pausing in their
work, and even when at work they do it in a slow, dawdling, lack-energy
way that is positively irritating to watch. The agriculturist has in
consequence plenty to do to keep his eye on them, and in the course of the
day he walks over his farm half-a-dozen times at least. Very few ordinary
working farmers walk much less than ten miles a day on the average,
backwards and forwards over the fields.

Half-past eleven used to be luncheon time, but now it is about twelve,
except in harvest, when, as work begins earlier, it is at eleven. This
luncheon hour is another source of constant irritation to the agriculturist. He
does not wish to bind his men down to an exact minute, and if a man has
some distance to walk to his cottage, will readily make all allowance. He
does not stint the beer carried out either then or in the field. But do what he
likes, be as considerate as he will, and let the season be never so pressing, it
is impossible to get the labourers out to their work when the hour is up.
Most of them go to sleep, and have to be waked up, after which they are as
stupid as owls for a quarter of an hour. One or two, it will be found, have
strolled down to the adjacent ale-house, and are missing. These will come
on the field about an hour later. Then one man has a rake too heavy for him,
and another a prong too light. There is always some difficulty in starting to
work; the agriculturist must therefore be himself present if he wishes to get
the labourers out to the field in anything like a moderate time.
The nuisance of mowers must be gone through to be appreciated. They
come and work very well for the first week. They slash down acre after
acre, and stick to it almost day and night. In consequence the farmer puts on
every man who applies for work, everything goes on first-rate, and there is
a prospect of getting the crop in speedily. At the end of the week the
mowers draw their money, quite a lump for them, and away they go to the
ale-house. Saturday night sees them as drunk as men can be. They lie about
the fields under the hedges all day Sunday, drinking when the public-house
is open. Monday morning they go on to work for half-an-hour, but the fever
engendered by so much liquor, and the disordered state of the stomach,
cause a burning thirst. They fling the scythes down, and go off to the barrel.
During all this week perhaps between them they manage to cut half an acre.
What is the result? The haymakers have made all the grass that was cut the
first week into hay, and are standing about idle, unable to proceed, but still
drawing their wages from the unfortunate agriculturist. The hot sun is
burning on—better weather for haymaking could not be—but there is not a
rood of grass cut for them to work on. After a while the mowers come back,
thoroughly tired and exhausted with their debauch, and go on feebly to
work. There is hope again. But our climate is notoriously changeable. A
fortnight of warm, close heat is pretty sure to breed a thunderstorm.
Accordingly, just as the scythes begin to lay the tall grass prostrate again,

there is a growl in the sky, and down comes the rain. A thunderstorm
unsettles the weather, and here is perhaps another week lost. The farmer
dares not discharge his haymakers, because he does not know but that he
may require them any day. They are put to turn dung-heaps, clean out the
yards, pick up the weeds in the garden, and such like little jobs, over which
they can dawdle as much as they like. All the while they are on full pay.
Now, what manufacturer could endure such conduct as this? Is it not
enough to drive a saint out of his patience? Of course the larger farmers
who can afford it have the resource of the mowing-machine, but there are
hundreds and thousands of farms upon which its sharp rattle has not yet
been heard. There is still a great divergence of opinion as to its merits,
many maintaining that it does not cut so close to the ground, and therefore
wastes a large percentage of the crop, and others that the action of the
scissor-like knives bruises the grass, and prevents it growing up into a good
after-math. Therefore many farmers who could afford it will not admit the
mowing-machine into their fields, and the mowers may still be seen at work
over miles and miles of meadow, and are still the plague of the agriculturist.
The arable farmer has just the same difficulty to keep his labourers at their
work, and unless he is constantly on the watch valuable time is lost daily. In
the harvest, however, he has an advantage. The corn is reaped by piece-
work, and the labourers therefore strain every nerve to do as much as they
can. But then he must be on the lookout to see that they do not "scamp" it.
The traditional bacon and greens dinner is passing away, though still the
usual fare in the small farmhouses. Most of the fairly well-to-do farmers
have a joint twice or three times a week, well supported with every kind of
vegetable. There is no attempt at refinement in cooking, but there is plenty
of good substantial food.
The hill farmer, whose staple is sheep and wool, has generally a great deal
of walking or riding to get over in the day. The down farms are sometimes
very large, running perhaps in long narrow strips of land for two or three
miles. Although he employs a head-shepherd, and even a bailiff, he finds it
necessary, if he would succeed in making a profit, to be pretty well
ubiquitous. They all want looking after sharply. Not that there is much
actual dishonesty; but would any manufacturer endure to have his men
sitting doing nothing on their benches for fifteen minutes out of every hour
of the working day, just because his back was turned? The hill farmer has,

perhaps, a preferable life in some respects to the agriculturist in the vale. He
has not so much actual manual labour to get through. On the other hand, he
is at a great distance from any town, or even large village; he sees no one
during the day, and he has to run great risks. Wool may fall, so may the
price of mutton, either of which would derange his calculations; or the fly
may destroy his turnips, or the season may be exceptionally dry and
unfavourable. His house is lonely, perched on the side of a hill, and exposed
to the bitter blasts of winter which sweep over the downs with resistless
fury, and which no doors nor windows can exclude. If there should be snow,
it is sure to fall in greater quantities on the hills, and, driving before the
wind, fills up the hollows, till the roads are impassable for weeks.
Taking all the year round, the work of the agriculturist begins and ends with
the rising and setting of the sun. There is an exception, because the cows
must be milked and foddered nearly as early in the winter, when the sun
rises very late, as at other seasons; but then, to make up for that, work ends
earlier in the afternoon. In the spring, as the evenings draw out, there is
almost always something to be done even after the labourers have left. In
harvest time, the superintendence of work continues till late, and in the
autumn labour is not unfrequently prolonged into the moonlight, in order to
carry the corn. It is a life, on the whole, of hard work.
In all this I speak of the ordinary middle-class farmer. The life of the higher
class of agriculturists, who possess large capital, and employ bailiffs and all
kinds of machinery, is of course not by any means so onerous. It is in
general character pretty much that of an independent gentleman, with the
addition of the sporting element, and a certain freedom from drawing-room
trammels.
To get at the physique of the agriculturists, the best plan is to pay a visit to
the market-town. Here almost every farmer in the neighbourhood, no matter
of what class—highest, middle, or lowest—is nearly sure to be seen on
market-days. The upper class come in in their smart waggonettes, or dog-
carts, drawn by thoroughly good and stylish horses, which are little, if at all,
inferior to those of the gentry. Some of these keep their groom and
coachman, who dress in livery of a quiet and subdued kind, but still
unmistakably a livery. The middle-class come in in traps, or old-fashioned
four-wheelers, generally bringing their wives and daughters, to do the

shopping of the week. The market-day is, in fact, the event of the week, and
the streets of the market-town are the Rotten Row of the neighbourhood.
The wives and daughters come in their best dresses, and promenade up and
down, and many a flirtation goes on with the young bucks of the district.
The lower class of farmers jog in on their mares, rough as cart-horses, and
the rider generally so manages to seat himself as to show three or four
inches of stocking between his trousers and boots. After the market is over,
and the dealing done, the farmers resort to the various inns, and dine at the
market ordinary. A very good dinner is usually provided at a low charge on
these days. Soup is not usual, the dinner generally beginning with fish,
followed by joints, and fowl of various kinds. Wine "whips" are formed,
and the sherry circulates freely. There is a regular chairman, always a man
of property and influence, and an old frequenter of the place. After dinner
they sit an hour or two discussing, not only the price of sheep and wool or
mutton, but the political and other events of the day. The Chambers of
Agriculture are generally so arranged as to meet on market-days, about an
hour after the ordinary finishes, and not unfrequently in the same room. The
market-towns derive great benefit from this habit of congregating on the
market-day. It is the day, too, for paying visits by the ladies. Gay costumes
pass through the streets, and bright eyes look out of the windows of the
hotels upon the crowd of farmers. The yards of the various hostelries are
made almost impassable by the innumerable variety of vehicles. The young
farmers take the opportunity of playing a game at billiards, which they
rarely do on other days. The news of the whole countryside is exchanged,
and spreads from mouth to mouth, and is carried home and sent farther on
its way. One great characteristic is the general good-humour that prevails.
The laugh and the joke are frequently heard—it is a kind of moderate gala-
day. The fishmonger's shop is emptied, and the contents carried home, this
being the only day in the week when fish is bought by the majority of
agriculturists. Some towns have only what is called a "gin-and-water"
market: that is, the "deal" is begun and concluded from small samples
carried in the pocket and examined at an inn over a glass of spirits and
water. But in the great market-towns there is now almost always a large
room, or hall, set aside for this special purpose. The market begins and
concludes at a fixed time, indicated by the ringing of a bell. In this hall the
dealers have stands, furnished with desks, at which they may always be
found, and here sacks of samples are pitched. There is a clerk of the market,

and the current prices are posted up, and afterwards sent to all the local
newspapers. The cattle-market used to be carried on entirely in the streets,
each farmer selling his own beasts or sheep by private treaty with the
dealers. The streets were then often filled with cattle from one end to the
other, and were almost impassable for vehicles, and at times not a little
dangerous for foot-passengers. Now the practice of selling by auction has
become very general, and the cattle are either put into the auctioneer's
private yard, or in an enclosure provided by the town authorities. The corn-
dealers are a most energetic class of men, well educated, and often
employing large capital in their business. They are perpetually travelling,
and often attend two markets a day. Having struck a bargain, the farmer and
the purchaser adjourn to the hotel, and have a glass of spirits, without which
no transaction seems complete. The use of beer has very much declined
among the fairly well-to-do agriculturists. They drink it at dinner and lunch,
but whenever a glass is taken with a friend, or in calling at an inn, it is
almost invariably spirits. Whisky has been most extensively drunk of late
years.
No other class of men employing so much capital and so many labourers
are so simple in their habits as the agriculturists. In dress they adhere to the
plainest colours and shapes; there is no attempt to keep pace with the
fashion. The materials of the coat and vest are good, and even expensive,
but the cut is old and out of date, and the whole effect quite plain. There is
no shirt front, no studs, no rings, no kid gloves. The boots are strong and
thick, substantial, but not ornamental. A man with his ten or fifteen
thousand perhaps will walk down the street buttoned up in an ungainly
greatcoat and an old hat, not half so smartly dressed as a well-paid
mechanic, and far behind the drapers' assistants in style. There is a species
of contempt among them for the meretricious and showy; they believe in
the solid. This very fact makes them good friends to shopkeepers, who have
no better customers. They carry this leading idea too far, for they admire an
article in precisely a corresponding ratio to the money it costs, totally
oblivious of all considerations of art or ornament. The first question
invariably is, if they are asked to admire anything, "What did it cost?" This
results in a heavy and cumbrous style of furniture even in the best
farmsteads. Everything must be massive, costly, and strong. Artistic
tendencies they have none. They want something durable, and they get it.

But on the whole they make marvellously little show for their money.
Hundreds of the most substantial agriculturists, whose cheques would be
honoured for thousands of pounds, seem absolutely to make no show at all.
At the same time it is quite true that some of the rising generation, who
have very little to do it on, make a great display with hunters and plated
harness, and so forth. But they are not the rule. The generality go just the
other way, and live below their income, and take a lower station in society
than they might reasonably claim.
Farmers are decidedly a marrying class of men. The farm is a business in
which a wife is of material service, and can really be a helpmate. The lower
class of farmers usually marry quite as much or more for that reason than
any others. The higher classes of agriculturists feel that they have a right to
marry because they too can show a home in which to keep a wife. Though
they may not have any large amount of capital, still they possess a good
house and sufficient provision. They are, therefore, a marrying class of
men, but do not commonly contract matrimonial alliances very early in life.
The great object of an agriculturist who has sons is to get them settled in
farms, and it is astonishing to what an extent this is carried by men who do
not seem to have much capital to start their children with. Instances are
common in which a man has three or four sons all in farms, and doing fairly
well. One of the greatest difficulties he has to contend against is the
necessity of providing education. Where is a farmer, living perhaps two or
three miles, often enough four and six miles, from a town, to send his boys
to school? The upper class of agriculturists can, of course, afford to have a
proper governess at home till they are old enough, and then send them to
one of the so-called middle-class schools. The lower class, on the other
hand, who do not aspire very high, and whose ideas are little more
ambitious than those of their labourers, are contented with the school in the
neighbouring village. Till recently these village schools were very poor
affairs, something a little better than the old dame school, but not much. But
since the new Education Act the lower class of farmers are in a better
position with respect to education than those who possess much higher
claims to social distinction. Where there is not a school board, the
clergyman and the landowners have combined, and built first-rate schools,
up to all the requirements of the Act, and attended by properly certified
teachers. The lower class farmer, who is troubled with no scruples about the

association of his boys with the labourers' children, can send them to this
school at a very low charge indeed, and they will there receive a good
foundation. But the middle-class farmer—the man who is neither an
independent gentleman, nor obliged to live on bacon and greens—is
unprovided for, and yet this class is the most numerous. They have better
views for their sons than to confine those early impressions upon which so
much depends to the narrow and rude, if not coarse manners of the
labourers' children. They look higher than that, and they are fully justified
in doing so. They do not, therefore, at all relish the idea of sending their
boys to the national school of the parish, let it be never so well supplied
with teachers. There is another objection to it. It has a faint suspicion of the
pauper. Now if there is anything a downright English yeoman abominates
more than all the rest it is any approach to the "parish." This is a "parish"
school. It is not a paupers' school—that is admitted—but it is a "parish"
school, to which the children of men who have often received relief are
sent. The yeoman's instinct revolts at it. Attempts have been made to get
over this niceness of feeling by erecting a special class-room for farmers'
sons, and patriotic baronets have even gone so far as to send their own boys
so as to set the example. But it is in vain. The middle-class farmer is above
all men exclusive in his ideas. He detests the slightest flavour of
communism. He likes to be completely and fully independent. He will not
patronise the "parish" school. What then is he to do? At this present moment
most farmers' sons are sent into the neighbouring towns to the middle-class
schools which are to be found there. If the farmer is within two or three
miles the boys walk or ride on ponies every morning. If it is farther than
that they go as weekly boarders, and return home every Saturday. The fault
in this system is simply and solely in the character of the school. Too often
it is a school in name only, where the boys learn next to nothing at all,
except mischief. Very few schools exist in these small country towns which
afford a good education at a moderate price. It is almost impossible that
they should exist without an endowment, as the scholars can never be
numerous enough to make the profits exceed the expenditure. The result is
that the middle-class farmer cannot give his boys a good education unless
he sends them to what is called a middle-class school in some town at a
great distance, and this he cannot afford. The sum demanded by these so-
called middle-class schools is beyond his reach. He may, perhaps, if he has
only one son, indulge in the expensive luxury of a sound and thorough

education for him. But if there are several the thing is out of the question.
With the girls it is even worse—where can he send them? They cannot very
well walk or ride to and fro like the boys to the school in the nearest town,
and if they are boarded at such schools, the education given is paltry and
meagre in the extreme. A good girls' school is one of the rarest things in the
country. The result is that a governess is kept while the girls are young. This
governess is underpaid, and has consequently herself been only partially
educated. Then as the girls grow older they are sent for a year or two, to
"finish" them, to some young ladies' academy, and the ultimate product is a
smattering of French and music, and crude ideas of fashion and refinement,
which make them dissatisfied with their home and unfit for an agricultural
life as the wife of a farmer.
The nonsense talked and published of farmers having pianos, and their
daughters strumming all day long instead of attending to the dairy, is
perfectly absurd. It is quite true that in hundreds of farmhouses, just at the
time when the dairy is in full work in the morning, a piano may be heard
going. This is the governess instructing the girls when the farmer is not
sufficiently rich to send them to a school. But when once these girls are
grown up, and have finished their education, poor as it is, and return home
to take a part in the household duties, then the piano is never heard in the
morning when work is about. The farmer's wife sees to that sharp enough.
In the evening it may be heard—and why not? If the agricultural labourer is
to be polished up and refined, why on earth should not his employer take a
step in advance? It must be remembered that there is very little society in
the country; scarcely any one even passing along the road. There are none
of those cheap sights and amusements so readily accessible to the poorest in
a great city. The wives and daughters of the mechanics and workmen in
London can once a week at least afford to enjoy themselves at some theatre
or place of amusement. They are far better off in this respect than the
daughters of agriculturists who may be worth thousands. These have
nothing whatever to amuse themselves with during the long evenings; they
cannot even take a stroll out and look at the shop windows. They are surely
entitled to the simple and inexpensive amusement of a piano. It is in fact
their only resource. There was a statement in the newspapers of farmers
taking their daughters to Paris. It is possible that some of the upper class of
farmers, who are in fact independent gentlemen, may have done so; but as

for the ordinary middle-class farmers, such a thing is utterly unheard of. It
is very few of them who even take their wives to London or the seaside for
a week. But even if they did, it is nothing more than they are entitled to do.
Half the tradesmen who do such things do not possess anything like the
income of the farmers. The fact is, that the agriculturists are a singularly
stay-at-home race of men. The great majority never leave their farms to go
farther than the market-town from one year's end to the other. Above all
classes they are attached to their homes, and slow to go away even
temporarily. To such a length is this feeling carried that men have been
known to go partially insane for a while at the prospect of having to quit a
farm through a landlord's decease, even though no appreciable pecuniary
loss was involved.
The agriculturists are a remarkably observant race, and as a rule peculiarly
well-informed. This is contrary to the popular belief, which represents the
farmer as rude and ignorant, a pot-bellied beer-drinker, and nothing more.
But the popular belief is a delusion. I do not say that they are literary or
scientific in their tastes and private pursuits. There are no great names
among them in geology, or astronomy, or anthropology, or any other
science. They are not artists in any sense. But they are singularly well-
informed. They possess more general knowledge than any other class, and
can converse on subjects with which townsmen seem unacquainted. Many
of them have very fair libraries, not extensive, but containing books of
sterling excellence. Farming is necessarily an isolated business—there is
little society. Except on market-days, there is scarcely any interchange of
conversation. There is, too, at certain seasons of the year a good deal of
leisure. What books they own, therefore, are well read, and the contents
reflected upon. It is that habit of thinking over what is read that makes all
the difference. It is impossible to avoid being struck with the immense
amount of general information possessed by some agriculturists, and the
wide field over which their knowledge ranges. Yet with all this knowledge
and power of reflection they still remain attached to the old-world system of
politics, religion, and social relations.
The habits of intemperance which were at one time a just and standing
reproach against the agriculturist have almost entirely disappeared. A
drunken farmer is now unknown. They are as fond as ever of offering
hospitality to a friend, and as ready to take a social glass—no total

abstainers amongst them; but the steady hard-drinking sot has passed away.
The old dodge of filling the bottle with gin instead of water, and so pouring
out pure spirit, instead of spirit and water, when the guests were partially
intoxicated, in order to complete the process, is no more known. They do
not drink more than the inhabitants of towns.
It is a singular fact that with so many streams and ponds scattered about the
country within easy reach, the farmers do not care for fishing. A farmer
engaged in fishing is a rarity indeed. They are eagerly fond of fox-hunting,
coursing, and shooting, but fishing is a dead letter. A party will sometimes
go out and net a pond, but as for fishing proper, with rod and line, it is
almost unknown. Every chance of shooting is eagerly snatched at. In May
the young rooks are shot, after which the gun is put aside for a while. At the
end of July some of the young rabbits are ready, and are occasionally
knocked over. Very few tenant farmers shoot game even when they could
do so, leaving that for some neighbouring gentleman with whom they are
friendly, and this too without any remuneration, the fact being that winged
game does little damage. But they wage unceasing war on the rabbits, with
dog and gun and ferret. All the winter long they are hunted in every possible
way. This is, of course, on farms where the tenant has permission to kill the
rabbits. Whist and post and pair are the staple indoor amusements.
Of all businesses that of agriculture is peculiarly adapted to descend from
father to son. In point of fact, farms so frequently pass from the father to the
son as to be looked upon almost as a certain inheritance. In agriculture,
then, it must be expected that the effects of inherited instincts and ideas
should be very plainly shown. From this cause arises the persistent and
unreasoning Conservatism of the mass of agriculturists. Out of a list of one
hundred farmers, I find that one resides upon a farm which has been in the
occupation of members of the same family for three hundred years. He
possessed a series of documents, receipts, special agreements, and so on,
proving that descent beyond all cavil; but with the usual want of proper
appreciation for antiquities, most of these papers have been committed to
the flames; still there is no question of the fact, which can still be shown
from the landlord's family archives. Nominally that farm has been in the
occupation of one family for ten generations, reckoning by the ordinary
calculation of thirty years to each. But this average is not fairly applicable
to the agricultural life, which is generally long, and occasionally extends

into extreme old age. There were probably about eight successors if the line
was unbroken; if not, there may of course have been treble that number. A
man may be excused some amount of pride when he thinks of such a
continuance as this in one spot, for it means not only an exceptional vitality
of race, but an exceptional perseverance in the paths of honesty and
straightforwardness. But with this pride it also engenders a stubborn
unchangeableness, a dislike and hatred of all things new and unfamiliar, a
nervous dread of reform. Faithful to the logic of their class, such men as
these may in resisting innovations go to lengths which may appear foolish
and wrong to others who live in a widely different social atmosphere. To
some extent the bitter opposition to change in the position of the labourer,
which is thrown in the teeth of the tenant farmer, is the outcome of these
very centuries of steady adherence to all that they believed upright and
manly.
Another name on my list has been known at one spot for fully two hundred
years. These men attained a position beyond that of yeoman, but they never
sank beneath it. The rise of many of the great county families really dates
from the success of some ancestor, or the collective success of a series of
ancestors, in agriculture. They perhaps claim some knight or nobleman as
the founder of the race, although he may have really done nothing for the
practical advantage of the family; the true founders being merely
proprietors of land, dignified as J.P.'s, and sometimes sheriffs, throwing off
branches into the clerical and legal professions. The real ancestor was the
sturdy yeoman who accumulated the money to purchase the farm he tilled,
and whose successors had the good sense to go on adding acre to acre till
they finally expanded into the wide domains of the modern squire. Not the
knight whose effigy in brass paves the aisle of the parish church laid the
corner-stone of the wealth and power of to-day, but the shrewd and close-
fisted producer and dealer in wool and corn. Their true claim to aristocratic
privileges and importance is the sense of centuries of independence. These
others of whom we have spoken, the yeoman who never aspired beyond the
yeoman's position, are as ancient and as "worshipful"—to use an old and
disused term—as they. I do not instance these descents of three and two
hundred years as extraordinary, because I believe that they could be
paralleled and even extended by inquiry, but because they came under my
own observation. There are others on the list ranging from one hundred and

sixty down to sixty and eighty years of continued occupation. But not to go
into details, I reckon on an average that thirty names out of a hundred have
been the occupiers for three generations; forty for two generations; twenty
for one hundred and fifty years; and ten are new comers. But a still more
curious and instructive fact is the permanence of certain names over a wide
section of country; so much so that in places it is a common saying that one
has only to be an A, or a B, or a T, to be certain of getting a farm. Whole
parishes seem related, and not very distantly related either; and yet there is
not the remotest class-feeling or esprit de corps. The isolation and
independence of a farm life are powerful agents in preventing anything like
cohesion. Any one who will take the trouble to look down the parish
register in a strictly agricultural district will be forcibly struck with the
permanence of certain names. Page after page contains nothing but records
of the marriages, intermarriages, burials, baptisms, and so on of two or
three generic names. The population appears to have been stationary for
scores upon scores of years. Say what you will, ridicule it as you like, there
is a charm clinging round that which time has hallowed; and even the man
of the hour, the successful speculator, yields to this. It is his most eager
desire to become a landed proprietor, and if possible he buys a place where
he can exercise manorial rights.
Taking these things into consideration, it is only reasonable to admit that
agriculture is a profession in which a man may, above all others, be excused
if he manifests a certain amount of irritability at the prospect of change. The
slow round of uneventful years, the long continuance of manual labour, the
perpetual iteration of a few ideas, in time produce in the mind of the most
powerfully intellectual men a species of unconscious creed; and this creed
is religiously handed down from generation to generation. Setting aside
those who have gone into agriculture as a science, and adapt everything to
commercial principles—and they are as yet not very numerous—the great
mass of farmers believe nearly the same now as they did two centuries ago.
Looking through a farmer's calendar published in the first few years of this
century, and containing a complete résumé of the system of agriculture
practised then, I was struck by the remarkable fact that in all main features
it was the same as that in use now. We have heard so much of the rapid
progress of agriculture, of the important changes introduced, and of the
complete revolution which has taken place, that this statement may appear

incredible. It is nevertheless the fact that that book might be put with
advantage into the hands of any young man about to enter upon a farm.
With the exception of those operations which are now performed by steam,
and making an allowance for the altered conditions introduced by the
abolition of the Corn Laws, the instructions given there are useful down to
this very day. Here is the knowledge of the peculiarities and requirements of
stock slowly accumulated during ages of agriculture, and at last written
down and printed for easy reference. However much the aspect of politics
may change, or however much the means of locomotion and
communication may be facilitated by the introduction of steam, Nature still
remains unaltered. The cows and sheep retain their instincts and their
internal economy; their modes of feeding, times of rest, and seasons of
increase, never vary. The earth too has not changed. The corn is sown at the
same time; Nature goes on her way as before, heedless of the railway rattle.
So it is that the details of management in this book are as useful now as
then, more than two generations since. It is the same with the unwritten
faith of the men who labour and live among these things. Go out among
them, and collect from the majority their views and sentiments, and in this
age of progress they will be found to correspond almost exactly with those
of their forefathers, as recorded by history. They know that such is the fact
themselves; they know too that it would subject them to sharp criticism and
reproof if they published their real opinions. Therefore they remain silent,
and it is only among themselves that these ideas are earnestly insisted on.
In the earliest days of agriculture, when Abraham drove his flocks and herds
to and fro under the Syrian sun, the father of the family was at once the
procreator, the law-giver, the judge, the leader in battle, the priest, and the
king. He was absolute master under Heaven of all things visible around
him. The Pope claims to be infallible now, and to be the vicegerent of
Heaven, but the patriarch of old actually possessed those powers upon his
own domain. His sons were under his complete control—he could sacrifice
them alive to his God if he chose, or banish them from their native land. His
daughters were still more completely in his hand, to be done with as he
thought fit. His servants, his slaves, were as much his as the wooden pole of
his tent, or the very sandals he walked in. They were as dust before him.
There was no coming of age in those days; no escape after the twenty-first
year. The tie lasted till his death. At forty his sons and daughters were as

much his own as they were at ten years old. They tell us that this system, to
some extent, still survives in China. In all fundamental points such is the
creed of the agricultural race of our own day. Circumstances have, no
doubt, had something to do with the production and elaboration of such a
faith. In no other profession do the sons and the daughters remain so long,
and so naturally, under the parental roof. The growth of half-a-dozen strong
sons was a matter of self-congratulation, for each as he came to man's estate
took the place of a labourer, and so reduced the money-expenditure. The
daughters worked in the dairy, and did not hesitate to milk occasionally, or,
at least, to labour in the hayfield. They spun, too, the home-made stuffs in
which all the family were clothed. A man's children were his servants. They
could not stir a step without his permission. Obedience and reverence to the
parent was the first and greatest of all virtues. Its influence was to extend
through life, and through the whole social system. They were to choose the
wife or the husband approved of at home. At thirty, perhaps, the more
fortunate of the sons were placed on farms of their own nominally, but still
really under the father's control. They dared not plough or sow except in the
way that he approved. Their expenditure was strictly regulated by his
orders. This lasted till his death, which might not take place for another
twenty years. At the present moment I could point out ten or twelve such
cases, where men of thirty or forty are in farms, and to all appearance
perfectly free and independent, and yet as completely under the parental
thumb as they were at ten years old. Why do they not throw off the burden?
Because they have imbibed the same creed, and intend to carry it out in
their own persons. These men, if they think thus of their own offspring,
cannot be expected to be more tender towards the lower class around them.
They did at one time, and some still wish to, extend the same system to the
labouring population. As there was in those days little or no work for a man
but upon a farm, and as the cottages were chiefly in the hands of the
farmers, there was plenty of opportunity for carrying out these ideas. The
old method of poor relief gave another handle. They did not want only to
indulge in tyranny; what they did was to rule the labouring poor in the same
way as they did their own children—nothing more nor less. These labouring
men, like his own children, must do as the farmer thought best. They must
live here or there, marry so and so, or forfeit favour—in short, obey the
parental head. Each farmer was king in his own domain; the united farmers
of a parish were kings of the whole place. They did not use the power

circumstances gave them harshly; but they paid very little regard to the
liberty of the subject. To this very day something of the same sort goes on.
It is wonderful with what eager zeal many of the old-style farmers enter into
the details of a labourer's life, and carefully ascertain his birth, his
parentage, his marriage, his wife's parentage, and the very minutest matters.
These facts thus accumulated are talked over in the boardroom when an
applicant comes to the union for relief. Very often such special knowledge
possessed by a guardian of the antecedents of the applicant is most useful
and beneficial in enabling the Board to extend assistance to a deserving
man. What I wish to show is the all-permeating influence of the parental
system in the mind of the typical agriculturist.
In religion it is, or lately was, the same. It was not a matter with the farmer
of the Athanasian creed, or the doctrine of salvation by faith, or any other
theological dogma. To him the parish church was the centre of the social
system of the parish. It was the keystone of that parental plan of
government that he believed in. The very first doctrine preached from the
pulpit was that of obedience. "Honour thy father and mother" was
inculcated there every seventh day. His father went to church, he went to
church himself, and everybody else ought to go. It was as much a social
gathering as the dinner at the market ordinary, or the annual audit dinner of
their common landlord. The dissenter, who declined to pay church-rates,
was an unsocial person. He had left the circle. It was not the theology that
they cared about, it was the social nonconformity. In a spiritual sense, too,
the clergyman was the father of the parish, the shepherd of the flock—it
was a part of the great system. To go a step farther, in political affairs the
one leading idea still threaded itself through all. The proper parliamentary
representative—the natural law-giver—was the landlord of the district. He
was born amongst them, walked about amongst them, had been in their
houses many a time. He knew their wants, their ideas, their views. His own
interest was identical with theirs. Therefore he was the man. The logic is
indisputable. What is more, they acted up to it. In agricultural districts it is
not uncommon even now to find men of diametrically opposite political
views to the candidate at an election voting for and supporting him, simply
and solely because he is the local man. It is natural and right that he should
represent them. That one word "right" is the key to the whole ethical system
of the agriculturists. They cherish and maintain their belief in right, and in

their "rights"—by which they understand much the same thing—even when
unaccompanied by any gain or advantage. In brief outline, such is the creed
of the agriculturists as a body. It is neither written nor spoken, but it is a
living faith which influences every hour of their lives.
This faith must ever be borne in mind by those who wish to understand the
movements of the agricultural world. Without making a proper allowance
for it, the farmers will be easily misjudged.
The labouring class are imbued to a great extent with the very same ideas.
They stick to their rights. They will not give up an old pathway that their
fathers used, not if one twice as convenient be offered in lieu of it. They
have a right to go that way, and go that way they will. They are brutally
tyrannical over their children. I use those words deliberately. He who spares
the rod spoils the child, is the practical rule of their conduct. They seem to
look upon their offspring as merely slaves. They are fond of them in their
way, no doubt, but the law of implicit obedience is maintained by dint of
blows and stripes. The children are kicked, punched, and thrashed
perpetually. A good ground-ash stick is the gospel of the labouring man.
They carry the same plan into their work. How many carters have been
severely fined and imprisoned for whipping, and sometimes even maiming,
the boys under their commands? And yet the old practice still continues,
only a little checked by wholesome terror of the law.
Despite of all the teaching of the Radical papers, all the whispers of the
Methodist itinerant preachers, despite the hatred which the Labourers'
Union agents endeavour to sow between the labourer and the farmer, still
the great mass of labourers at the last election,[1] wherever they had a vote,
supported the local candidate—the man who represented the soil—and
declined to do more than listen to the brilliant promises held out by the
party of change. So strong above all things is the force of tradition and
custom.
The agriculturists are firmly and earnestly wedded to that unwritten creed
which has grown up among them out of the past. Why, then, should they be
so hardly dealt with, more than others, for adhering to this faith? Argue with
them, educate them up to your standard if you like—but is it fair, is it just,
is it in accordance with that spirit of liberalism and tolerance which their

opponents profess, to taunt, abuse, and bully to the full length that words
will permit? They are not facile at expression, these same men of the soil.
The flow of language seems denied to them. They are naturally a silent race
—preferring deeds to speech. They live much with inarticulate nature. It
may be, after all, they have learnt some useful and abiding lessons from that
intercourse. The old shepherds on the plains of Chaldea, under the starry
skies of the East, watched the motions of those shining bodies till they
slowly built up a religion, which, mixed with much dross, nevertheless
contained some truths which educated men profess to this hour. These
English farmers also observe the changes of the seasons, and watch the face
of heaven. Their deepest convictions are not to be lightly set aside. There
are men amongst them of great powers of thought. I remember one at this
moment whose grand old head would have been a study for an artist. A
large head he had, well-balanced, broad and high at the forehead, deep-set
eyes, straight nose, and firm chin—every outward sign of the giant brain
within. But the man was dumb. The thoughts that came to him he could
communicate roughly to his friends, but the pen failed him. The horny hand
which results from manual labour is too stiff to wield the swiftly-gliding
quill. But there is another species of handwriting which is called Work—a
handwriting which will endure when the scribblings of the hour are utterly
forgotten. This writing he laboured at earnestly and eagerly, not for his own
good either, for it absorbed his own fortune, no small one, in the attempt to
realise his conception of machinery which would double the yield of food.
It has been done since his time, other men stepping over the bridge of
experience which he had built. Now this man, who, on the principles of the
opponents of the agriculturists, was a benefactor to his species, and a
pioneer of true progress, was, nevertheless, one of the firmest, staunchest,
most uncompromising supporters of that creed which they are endeavouring
to destroy, and which may be stated thus: "I believe in the Sovereign, the
Church, and the Land: the Sovereign being the father of the people in a
temporal sense; the Church in a spiritual sense; and the Land being the only
substantial and enduring means of subsistence. Cotton, coal, and iron
cannot be eaten, but the land gives us corn and beef; therefore, the land
stands first and foremost, and the agriculturist, as the tiller of land,
possesses an inalienable right which it is his duty to maintain, and in so
doing he is acting for the good of the community. I believe that the son and
the daughter should obey their parents, and show regard to their wishes

even when legally independent. Also that the servant should obey his
employer. The connection between employer and employed does not cease
with the payment of wages. It is the duty of the servant to show
consideration for the advice of the master; and the master is not free from
responsibility as to the education and the comfort of the man. The master is
bound by all laws, human and divine, to pay a fair amount of wages for a
day's work. If he does not do so he robs the workman as much as if he stole
the money from his pocket. The workman is equally bound to do his work
properly, and in neglecting to do so he robs his employer. To demand more
wages than has been earned is an attempt at robbery. Both master and man
should respect authority, and abide by its decisions."
Such is a slight outline of the home-life and the faith of the farmer.

FOOTNOTE:

[1] Feb. 1874.

THE LABOURER'S DAILY LIFE.
Many labourers can trace their descent from farmers or well-to-do people,
and it is not uncommon to find here and there a man who believes that he is
entitled to a large property in Chancery, or elsewhere, as the heir. They are
very fond of talking of these things, and naturally take a pride in feeling
themselves a little superior in point of ancestry to the mass of labourers.
How this descent from a farmer to a labourer is managed there are at this
moment living examples going about the country. I knew a man who for
years made it the business of his life to go round from farm to farm
soliciting charity, and telling a pitiful tale of how he had once been a farmer
himself. This tale was quite true, and as no class likes to see their order
degraded, he got a great deal of relief from the agriculturists where he was
known. He was said to have been wild in his youth, and now in his old age
was become a living representative of the farmer reduced to a labourer.
This reduction is, however, usually a slow process, and takes two
generations to effect—not two generations of thirty years each, but at least
two successors in a farm.
Perhaps the decline of a farming family began in an accession of unwonted
prosperity. The wheat or the wool went up to a high price, and the farmer
happened to be fortunate and possessed a large quantity of those materials.
Or he had a legacy left him, or in some way or other made money by good
fortune rather than hard work. This elated his heart, and thinking to rise still
higher in life, he took another, or perhaps two more large farms. But to
stock these required more money than he could produce, and he had to
borrow a thousand or so. Then the difficulty of attending to so large an
acreage, much of it distant from his home, made it impossible to farm in the
best and most profitable manner. By degrees the interest on the loan ate up
all the profit on the new farms. Then he attempted to restore the balance by
violent high farming. He bought manures to an unprecedented extent,
invested in costly machinery—anything to produce a double crop. All this
would have been very well if he had had time to wait till the grass grew; but

meantime the steed starved. He had to relinquish the additional farms, and
confine himself to the original one with a considerable loss both of money
and prestige. He had no energy to rise again; he relapsed into slow,
dawdling ways, perpetually regretting and dwelling on the past, yet making
no effort to retrieve it.
This is a singular and strongly marked characteristic of the agricultural
class, taken generally. They work and live and have their being in grooves.
So long as they can continue in that groove, and go steadily forward,
without much thought or trouble beyond that of patience and perseverance,
all goes well; but if any sudden jolt should throw them out of this rut, they
seem incapable of regaining it. They say, "I have lost my way; I shall never
get it again." They sit down and regret the past, granting all their errors with
the greatest candour; but the efforts they make to regain their position are
feeble in the extreme.
So our typical unfortunate farmer folds his hands, and in point of fact
slumbers away the rest of his existence, content with the fireside and a roof
over his head, and a jug of beer to drink. He does not know French, he has
never heard of Metternich, but he puts the famous maxim in practice, and,
satisfied with to-day, says in his heart, Après nous le Déluge. No one
disturbs him; his landlord has a certain respect and pity for him—respect,
perhaps, for an old family that has tilled his land for a century, but which he
now sees is slowly but irretrievably passing away. So the decayed farmer
dozes out his existence.
Meantime his sons are coming on, and it too often happens that the brief
period of sunshine and prosperity has done its evil work with them too.
They have imbibed ideas of gentility and desire for excitement utterly
foreign to the quiet, peaceful life of an agriculturist. They have gambled on
the turf and become involved. Notwithstanding the fall of their father from
his good position, they still retain the belief that in the end they shall find
enough money to put all to rights; but when the end comes there is a
deficiency. Among them there is perhaps one more plodding than the rest.
He takes the farm, and keeps a house for the younger children. In ten years
he becomes a bankrupt, and the family are scattered abroad upon the face of
the earth. The plodding one becomes a bailiff, and lives respectably all his

life; but his sons are never educated, and he saves no money; there is
nothing for them but to go out to work as farm labourers.
Such is something like the usual way in which the decline and fall of a
farming family takes place, though it may of course arise from unforeseen
circumstances, quite out of the control of the agriculturist. In any case the
children graduate downwards till they become labourers. Nowadays many
of them emigrate, but in the long time that has gone before, when
emigration was not so easy, many hundreds of families have thus become
reduced to the level of the labourers they once employed. So it is that many
of the labourers of to-day bear names which less than two generations ago
were well known and highly respected over a wide tract of country. It is
natural for them to look back with a certain degree of pleasure upon that
past, and some may even have been incited to attempt a return to the old
position.
But the great majority, the mass, of the agricultural labourers have been
labourers time out of mind. Their fathers were labourers, their grandfathers
and their great-grandfathers have all worked upon the farms, and very often
almost continuously during that long period of time upon the farms in one
parish. All their relations have been, and still are, labourers, varied by one
here who has become a tinker, or one there who keeps a small roadside
beerhouse. When this is the case, when a man and all his ancestors for
generations have been hewers of wood and drawers of water, it naturally
follows that the present representative of the family holds strongly to the
traditions, the instincts, acquired during the slow process of time. What
those instincts are will be better gathered from a faithful picture of his daily
life.
Most of the agricultural labourers are born in a thatched cottage by the
roadside, or in some narrow lane. This cottage is usually an encroachment.
In the olden time, when land was cheap, and the competition for it dull,
there were many strips and scraps which were never taken any notice of,
and of which at this hour no record exists either in the parochial papers or
the Imperial archives. Probably this arose from the character of the country
in the past, when the greater part was open, or, as it was called, champaign
land, without hedge, or ditch, or landmark. Near towns a certain portion
was enclosed generally by the great landowners, or for the use of the

tradesmen. There was also a large enclosure called the common land, on
which all burgesses or citizens had a right to feed so many cattle, sheep, or
horses. As a rule the common land was not enclosed by hedges in fields,
though instances do occur in which it was. There were very few towns in
the reign of Charles II. that had not got their commons attached to them; but
outside and beyond these patches of cultivation round the towns the country
was open, unenclosed, and the boundaries ill-defined. The king's highway
ran from one point to another, but its course was very wide. Roads were not
then macadamised and strictly confined to one line. The want of metalling,
and the consequent fearful ruts and sloughs, drove vehicles and travellers
further and further from what was the original line, till they formed a track
perhaps a score or two of yards wide. When fields became more generally
enclosed it was still only in patches, and these strips and spaces of green
sward were left utterly uncared for and unnoticed. These were encamped
upon by the gipsies and travelling folk, and their unmolested occupation no
doubt suggested to the agricultural labourer that he might raise a cottage
upon such places, or cultivate it for his garden.
I know of one spot at this present moment which was enclosed by an
agricultural labourer fully sixty years ago. It is an oval piece of ground of
considerable size, situated almost exactly in the centre of a very valuable
estate. He and his descendants continued to crop this garden of theirs
entirely unmolested for the whole of that time, paying no rent whatever. It
soon, however, became necessary to enlarge the size of the fields, which
were small, in order to meet the requirements of the modern style of
agriculture. This oval piece was surrounded by hedges of enormous growth,
and the cultivator was requested to remove to another piece more out of the
way. He refused to do so, and when the proprietors of the surrounding estate
came to inquire into the circumstances they found that they could do
nothing. He had enjoyed undisturbed possession for sixty years; he had paid
no rent—no quit rent or manor dues of any kind. But still further, when they
came to examine the maps and old documents, no mention whatever
appeared of this particular patch of ground. It was utterly unnoticed; it was
not recorded as any man's property. The labourer therefore retained
possession. This was an extraordinary case, because the encroachment took
place in the middle of a cultivated estate, where one would have thought the
tenants would have seen to it.

Commonly the squatters pitched on a piece of land—a long unused strip—
running parallel to the highway or lane. This was no one's property; it was
the property of the nation, which had no immediate representative to look
after its interests. The surrounding farmers did not care to interfere; it was
no business of theirs. The highway board, unless the instance was very
glaring, and some actual obstruction of the road was caused, winked at the
trespass. Most of them were farmers, and did not wish to interfere with a
poor man, who they knew had no other way of getting a house of his own.
By-and-by, when the cottage was built, the labourer was summoned to the
court-leet of the manor, and was assessed in quit rent, a mere nominal sum,
perhaps fourpence or a shilling a year. He had no objection to this, because
it gave him a title. As long as the quit rent was duly paid, and he could
produce the receipt, he was safe in the occupation of his cottage, and no one
could turn him out. To be assessed by the court-leet in fact established his
title. Some of these court-leets or manor courts are only held at intervals of
three years, or even more, and are generally composed of farmers, presided
over by the legal agent of the lord of the manor. The tenants of the manor
attend to pay their quit rent for the preceding years, and it often happens
that if the cottager has been ill, or is weak and infirm, the farmers
composing the court subscribe and pay the quit rent for him.
The first step when a labourer intends to become a squatter is to enclose the
strip of land which he has chosen. This he does by raising a low bank of
earth round it, on which he plants elder bushes, as that shrub grows
quickest, and in the course of two seasons will form a respectable fence.
Then he makes a small sparred gate which he can fasten with a padlock, and
the garden is complete. To build the cottage is quite another matter. That is
an affair of the greatest importance, requiring some months of thought and
preparation. The first thing is to get the materials. If it is a clay country, of
course bricks must be chosen; but in stone countries there are often quarries
on the farm on which he works. His employer will let him have a
considerable quantity of stone for nothing, and the rest at a nominal charge,
and will lend him a horse and cart at a leisure season; so that in a very short
time he can transport enough stone for his purpose. If he has no such friend,
there is almost sure to be in every parish a labouring man who keeps a
wretched horse or two, fed on the grass by the roadside, and gains his living
by hauling. Our architect engages this man at a low price to haul his

materials for him. The lime to make mortar he must buy. In the parish there
is nearly sure to be at least one native mason, who works for the farmers,
putting up pig-styes, mending walls, and doing small jobs of that kind. This
is the builder who engages to come on Saturday afternoons or in the
evenings, while the would-be householder himself is the hod-bearer and
mixes the mortar. Nine times out of ten the site for the cottage is chosen so
as to have a ditch at the back. This ditch acts at once as the cesspool and the
sewer, and, unless it happens to have a good fall, speedily becomes a
nuisance to the neighbourhood. A certain quantity of wood is of course
required in building even this humble edifice. This is either given by the
farmers or is purchased at a nominal rate.
The ground plan is extremely simple. It consists of two rooms, oblong, and
generally of the same size—one to live in, the other to sleep in—for the
great majority of the squatters' hovels have no upstair rooms. At one end
there is a small shed for odds and ends. This shed used to be built with an
oven, but now scarcely any labourers bake their own bread, but buy of the
baker. The walls of the cottage having been carried up some six feet, or six
feet six—just a little higher than a man's head—the next process is to
construct the roof, which is a very simple process. The roof is then thatched,
sometimes with flags cut from the brooks, but more usually with straw, and
practically the cottage is now built, for there are no indoor fittings to speak
of. The chimney is placed at the end of the room set apart for day use. There
is no ceiling, nothing between the floor and the thatch and rafters, except
perhaps at one end, where there is a kind of loft. The floor consists simply
of the earth itself rammed down hard, or sometimes of rough pitching-
stones, with large interstices between them. The furniture of this room is of
the simplest description. A few chairs, a deal table, three or four shelves,
and a cupboard, with a box or two in the corners, constitute the whole. The
domestic utensils are equally few, and strictly utilitarian. A great pot, a
kettle, a saucepan, a few plates, dishes and knives, half-a-dozen spoons, and
that is about all. But on the mantelpiece there is nearly sure to be a few
ornaments in crockery, bought from some itinerant trader. The walls are
whitewashed. The bedroom is plainly and rudely furnished. Some cottages
do not even attain to this degree of comfort. They consist of four posts set in
the ground which support the cross-beam and the roof, and the walls are
made of wattle and daub, i.e., of small split willow sticks, put upright and

daubed over with coarse plaster. The roofs of these cottages are often half
hidden with rank grass, moss, and sillgreen, a vegetation perhaps
encouraged by the drippings from a tree overhanging the roof; and the
situation of the cottage is itself in many cases low and damp.
But there is a class of squatters, who possess habitations more fit for human
beings. These were originally built by men who had saved a little money,
had showed, perhaps, a certain talent for hedge carpentering or thatching,
become tinkers, or even blacksmiths. In such capacities a man may save a
little money—not much, perhaps £30 or £40 at furthest. With the aid of this
he manages to build a very tidy cottage, in the face of the statement made
by architects and builders that a good cottage cannot be erected under £120.
Their dwellings do not, indeed, compete with the neat, prim, and business-
like work of the professional builder; but still they are roomy and
substantial cottages. The secret of cheapness lies in the fact that they work
themselves at the erection, and do not entrust some one else with a contract.
Moreover, they make shifts and put up with drawbacks as no business-man
could possibly do. The materials they purchase are cheap and of second-
class condition, but good enough to hold together and to last some time.
Their rude beams and rafters would not satisfy the eye of a landed
proprietor, but they hold up the roof-tree equally well. Every pound they
spend goes its full length, and not a penny is wasted. After a while a
substantial-looking cottage rises up, whitewashed and thatched. It has an
upper storey with two rooms, and two, at least, downstairs, with the
inevitable lean-to or shed, without which no labourer's cottage is complete.
This is more like a house, the residence of a man, than that of the poorer
squatter. The floor is composed of flag-stones, in this case always carefully
washed and holystoned. There are the same chairs and deal table as in the
poorer cottage, but there are many more domestic utensils, and the
chimney-piece is ornamented with more crockery figures. A few coarse
prints hang against the walls. Some of these old prints are great curiosities
in their way—hardly valuable enough for a collection, but very amusing. A
favourite set of prints is the ride of Dick Turpin to York on Black Bess,
representing every scene in that famous gallop. The upstair rooms are better
furnished, and the beds often really good.
Some of these cottages in summer-time really approach something of that
Arcadian beauty which is supposed to prevail in the country. Everything, of

course, depends upon the character of the inmates. The dull tint of the
thatch is relieved here and there by great patches of sillgreen, which is
religiously preserved as a good herb, though the exact ailments for which it
is "good" are often forgotten. One end of the cottage is often completely
hidden with ivy, and woodbine grows in thickest profusion over the porch.
Near the door there are almost always a few cabbage-rose trees, and under
the windows grow wall-flowers and hollyhocks, sweet peas, columbine, and
sometimes the graceful lilies of the valley. The garden stretches in a long
strip from the door, one mass of green. It is enclosed by thick hedges, over
which the dog-rose grows, and the wild convolvulus will blossom in the
autumn. Trees fill up every available space and corner—apple trees, pear
trees, damsons, plums, bullaces—all varieties. The cottagers seem to like to
have at least one tree of every sort. These trees look very nice in the spring
when the apple blossom is out, and again in the autumn when the fruit is
ripe. Under the trees are gooseberry bushes, raspberries, and numbers of
currants. The patches are divided into strips producing potatoes, cabbage,
lettuce, onions, radishes, parsnips; in this kitchen produce, as with the fruit,
they like to possess a few of all kinds. There is generally a great bunch of
rhubarb. In odd corners there are sure to be a few specimens of
southernwood, mugwort, and other herbs; not for use, but from adherence
to the old customs. The "old people" thought much of these "yherbs," so
they must have some too, as well as a little mint and similar potherbs. In the
windows you may see two or three geraniums, and over the porch a wicker
cage, in which the "ousel cock, with orange-tawny bill," pours out his rich
melodious notes. There is hardly a cottage without its captive bird, or tame
rabbit, or mongrel cur, which seems as much attached to his master as more
high-bred dogs to their owners.
These better cottages are extremely pleasing to look upon. There is an old
English, homely look about them. I know a man now whose cottage is
ornamented much in the way I have described, a man of sixty, who can
neither read nor write, and is rude and uncouth in speech, yet everything
about him seems pleasant and happy. To my eye the thatch and gables, and
picturesque irregularity of this class of cottages, are more pleasing than the
modern glaring red brick and prim slate of dwellings built to order, where
everything is cut with a precise uniformity. If a man can be encouraged to
build his own house, depend upon it it is better for him and his neighbours

than that he should live in one which is not his own. The sense of ownership
engenders a pride in the place, and all his better feelings are called into play.
Some of these cottagers, living in such houses as these, are the very best
labourers to be had. They stay on one farm a lifetime, and never leave it—
an invaluable aid to a farmer. They frequently possess some little special
knowledge of carpentering or blacksmith's work, which renders them
extremely useful, and at the same time increases their earnings. These men
are the real true peasantry, quiet and peaceful, yet strong and courageous.
These are the class that should be encouraged by every possible means; a
man who keeps his little habitation in the state I have described, who
ornaments it within, and fills his garden with fruit and flowers, though he
may be totally unable to read or to speak correctly, is nevertheless a good
and useful citizen, and an addition to the stability of the State.
Though these cottages are worth the smallest sums comparatively, it is
interesting to note with what pride and satisfaction the possessors
contemplate leaving them to their children. Of course this very feeling,
where there are quarrelsome relations, often leads to bickerings and strife. It
is astonishing with what tenacity a man who thinks he has a claim to a part
of such a small estate will cling to his cause, and will not hesitate to spend
to maintain his claim all his little earnings on the third-class lawyers whom
the agricultural poor mostly patronise. Even after every shadow of legal
chance is gone, he still loudly declares his right; and there is more
squabbling about the inheritance of these places than over the succession to
great domains.
Another class of labourers' cottages is found chiefly in the villages. These
were not originally erected for the purpose to which they are now applied;
they were farmhouses in the days when small farms were the rule, or they
were built for tradesmen who have long since departed. These buildings are
divided into two, three, or more habitations, each with its family; and many
makeshifts have to be resorted to to render them decent and comfortable.
This class of cottage is to be avoided if possible, because the close and
forced intercourse which must take place between the families generally
leads to quarrels. Perhaps there is one pump for the entire building, and one
wants to use it just at the moment that another requires water; or there is
only one gateway to the court, and the passage is obstructed by the
wheelbarrow of the other party. It is from these places that the greater part

of the malcontents go up to the magistrates in petty sessions. It is rare,
indeed, that the cottager living more or less isolated by the side of the road
appears in a court of law. Of course, in these villages there are cottages
which have been built expressly for the use of labouring men, and these,
like those in the open country, may be divided into three classes—the hovel,
the cottage proper, and the model modern cottage.
In the villages there is almost sure to be one or more cottages which carries
one's idea of Lilliputian dwellings to the extreme. These are generally sheds
or outhouses which have been converted into cottages. I entered one not
long since which consisted of two rooms, one above and one below, and
each of these rooms could not have measured, at a guess, more than six feet
six across. I had heard of this place, and expected to find it a perfect den of
misery and wretchedness. No such thing. To my surprise the woman who
opened the door was neatly clad, clean, and bright. The floor of the cottage
was of ordinary flag-stones, but there was a ceiling whitewashed and clean.
A good fire was burning in the grate—it was the middle of winter—and the
room felt warm and comfortable. The walls were completely covered with
engravings from the Illustrated London News. The furniture was equal to
the furniture of the best cottages, and everything was extremely clean. The
woman said they were quite comfortable; and although they could have had
a larger cottage many times since, they never wished to change, as they had
no children. That of course made a great difference. I never should have
thought it possible for two human beings to have existed, much less been
comfortable, in such a diminutive place. Another cottage I know contains
but one room altogether, which is about eight feet square; it is inhabited by
a solitary old woman, and looks like a toy-house. One or two such places as
these may be found in most villages, but it does not by any means follow
that because they are small the inhabitants are badly off. The condition they
are found in depends entirely upon the disposition of the inmates. If they
are slatternly and dirty, the largest cottages would not improve them.
In some rural villages a great many cottages may be observed sadly out of
repair—the thatch coming off and in holes, the windows broken, and other
signs of dilapidation. This is usually set down to the landlord's fault, but if
the circumstances are inquired into, it will often be found that the fault lies
with the inmates themselves. These cottages are let to labourers at a merely
nominal rent, and with them a large piece of allotment ground. But although

they thus get a house and garden almost free, they refuse to do the slightest
or simplest repairs. If the window gets broken—"Oh, let it stop; the
landlord can do that." If a piece of thatch comes off—"Oh, 'tisn't my house;
let the landlord do it up." So it goes on till the cottage is ready to tumble to
pieces. What is the landlord to do? In his heart he would like to raze the
whole village to the ground and rebuild it afresh. But there are not many
who can afford such an expense. Then, if it were done, the old women and
old men, and infirm persons who find a home in these places, would be
driven forth. If the landlord puts up two hundred new cottages, he finds it
absolutely necessary to get some kind of return for the capital invested. He
does not want more than two and a half per cent.; but to ask that means a
rise of perhaps a shilling a week. That is enough; the labourer seeks another
tumbledown place where he can live for tenpence a week, and the poor and
infirm have to go to the workhouse. So, rather than be annoyed with the
endless complaints and troubles, to say nothing of the inevitable loss of
money, the landlord allows things to go on as they are.
Among our English cottages in out-of-the-way places may be found curious
materials for the study of character in humble life. In one cottage you may
find an upright, stern-featured man, a great student of the Bible, and fond of
using its language whenever opportunity offers, who is the representative of
the old Puritan, though the denomination to which he may belong is
technically known as the Methodist. He is stern, hard, uncompromising—
one who sets duty above affection. His children are not spoiled because the
rod is spared. He stands aloof from his fellows, and is never seen at the
cottage alehouse, or lingering in groups at the cross-roads. He is certain to
be at the "anniversary," i.e., the commemoration of the foundation of the
Methodist chapel of the parish. The very next cottage may contain the
antithesis of this man. This is a genius in his way. He has some idea of art,
as you may gather from the fanciful patches into which his garden is
divided. He has a considerable talent for construction, and though he has
never been an apprentice he can do something towards mending a cart or a
door. He makes stands with wires to put flowers in for the farmers' parlours,
and strings the dry oak-apples on wire, which he twists into baskets, to hold
knicknackeries. He is witty, and has his jest for everybody. He can do
something of everything—turn his hand any way—a perfect treasure on the
farm. In the old days there was another character in most villages; this was

the rhymer. He was commonly the fiddler too, and sang his own verses to
tunes played by himself. Since the printing-press has come in, and flooded
the country with cheap literature, this character has disappeared, though
many of the verses these men made still linger in the countryside.
The ordinary adult farm labourer commonly rises at from four to five
o'clock; if he is a milker, and has to walk some little distance to his work,
even as early as half-past three. Four was the general rule, but of late years
the hour has grown later. He milks till five or half-past, carries the yokes to
the dairy, and draws water for the dairymaid, or perhaps chops up some
wood for her fire to scald the milk. At six he goes to breakfast, which
consists of a hunch of bread and cheese as the rule, with now and then a
piece of bacon, and as a milker he receives his quart of beer. At breakfast
there is no hurry for half-an-hour or so; but some time before seven he is on
at the ordinary work of the day. If a milker and very early riser, he is not
usually put at the heavy jobs, but allowances are made for the work he has
already done. The other men on the farm arrive at six. At eleven, or half-
past, comes luncheon, which lasts a full hour, often an hour and a quarter.
About three o'clock the task of milking again commences; the buckets are
got out with a good deal of rattling and noise, the yokes fitted to the
shoulders, and away he goes for an hour or hour and a half of milking. That
done, he has to clean up the court and help the dairymaid put the heavier
articles in place; then another quart of beer, and away home. The time of
leaving off work varies from half-past five to half-past six. At ordinary
seasons the other men leave at six, but in haymaking or harvest time they
are expected to remain till the job in hand that day is finished, often till
eight or half-past. This is compensated for by a hearty supper and almost
unlimited beer. The women employed in field labour generally leave at four,
and hasten home to prepare the evening meal. The evening meal is the great
event of the day. Like the independent gentleman in this one thing, the
labourer dines late in the day. His midday meal, which is the farmer's
dinner, is his luncheon. The labourer's dinner is taken at half-past six to
seven in the evening, after he has got home, unlaced his heavy and
cumbrous boots, combed his hair, and washed himself. His table is always
well supplied with vegetables, potatoes, and particularly greens, of which
he is peculiarly fond. The staple dish is, of course, a piece of bacon, and
large quantities of bread are eaten. It is a common thing now, once or twice

in the week, for a labourer to have a small joint of mutton, not a prime joint,
of course, but still good and wholesome meat. Many of them live in a style,
so far as eating and drinking is concerned, quite equal to the small farmers,
and far superior to what these small farmers were used to. Instead of beer,
the agricultural labourer frequently drinks tea with his dinner—weak tea in
large quantities. After the more solid parts comes a salad of onions or
lettuce. These men eat quantities which would half kill many townspeople.
After dinner, if it is the season of the year, they go out to the allotment and
do a little work for themselves, and then, unless the alehouse offers
irresistible attractions, to bed. The genuine agricultural labourer goes early
to bed. It is necessary for him, after the long toil of the day, on account of
the hour at which he has to rise in the morning.
Men employed on arable farms, as carters, for instance, have to rise even
earlier than dairymen. They often begin to bait their horses at half-past
three, or rather they used to. This operation of baiting is a most serious and
important one to the carter. On it depends the appearance of his team—with
him a matter of honest and laudable ambition. If he wishes his horses to
look fat and well, with smooth shiny coats, he must take the greatest care
with their food, not to give them too much or too little, and to vary it
properly. He must begin feeding a long time before his horses start to
plough. It is, therefore, an object with him to get to rest early. In the winter
time especially the labouring poor go to bed very soon, to save the expense
of candles.
By the bye, the cottagers have a curious habit, which deserves to be
recorded even for its singularity. When the good woman of the cottage goes
out for half-an-hour to fetch a pail of water, or to gossip with a neighbour,
she always leaves the door-key in the keyhole outside. The house is, in fact,
at the mercy of any one who chooses to turn the key and enter. This practice
of locking the door and leaving the key in it is very prevalent. The presence
of the key is to intimate that the inmate has gone out, but will shortly return;
and it is so understood by the neighbours. If a cottager goes out for the day,
he or she locks the door, and takes the key with them; but if the key is left
in the door, it is a sign that the cottager will be back in ten minutes or so.
The alehouse is the terrible bane of the labourer. If he can keep clear of that,
he is clean, tidy, and respectable; but if he once falls into drinking habits,

good-bye to all hopes of his rising in his occupation. Where he is born there
will he remain, and his children after him.
Some of the cottagers who show a little talent for music combine under the
leadership of the parish clerk and the patronage of the clergyman, and form
a small brass band which parades the village at the head of the Oddfellows
or other benefit club once a year. In the early summer, before the earnest
work of harvest begins, and while the evenings begin to grow long, it is not
unusual to see a number of the younger men at play at cricket in the
meadow with the more active of the farmers. Most populous villages have
their cricket club, which even the richest farmers do not disdain to join, and
their sons stand at the wicket.
The summer is the labourer's good season. Then he can make money and
enjoy himself. In the summer three or four men will often join together and
leave their native parish for a ramble. They walk off perhaps some forty or
fifty miles, take a job of mowing or harvesting, and after a change of
scenery and associates, return in the later part of the autumn, full of the
things they have seen, and eager to relate them to the groups at the cross-
roads or the alehouse. The winter is under the best circumstances a hard
time for the labourer. It is not altogether that coals are dear and firewood
growing scarcer year by year, but every condition of his daily life has a
harshness about it. In the summer the warm sunshine cast a glamour over
the rude walls, the decaying thatch, and the ivy-covered window. The blue
smoke rose up curling beside the tall elm-tree. The hedge parting his garden
from the road was green and thick, the garden itself full of trees, and
flowers of more or less beauty. Mud floors are not so bad in the summer;
holes in the thatch do not matter so much; an ill-fitting window-sash gives
no concern. But with the cold blasts and ceaseless rain of winter all this is
changed. The hedge next the road is usually only elder, and this, once the
leaves are off, is the thinnest, most miserable of shelters. The rain comes
through the hole in the thatch (we are speaking of the large class of poor
cottages), the mud floor is damp, and perhaps sticky. If the floor is of
uneven stones, these grow damp and slimy. The cold wind comes through
the ill-fitting sash, and drives with terrible force under the door. Very often
the floor is one step lower than the ground outside, and consequently there
is a constant tendency in rainy weather for the water to run or soak in. The
elm-tree overhead, that appeared so picturesque in summer, is now a curse,

for the great drops fall perpetually from it upon the thatch and on the
pathway in front of the door. In great storms of wind it sways to and fro,
causing no little alarm, and boughs are sometimes blown off it, and fall
upon the roof-tree. The thatch of the cottage is saturated; the plants and
grasses that almost always grow on it, and the moss, are vividly, rankly
green; till all dripping, soaked, overgrown with weeds, the wretched place
looks not unlike a dunghill. Inside, the draught is only one degree better
than the smoke. These low chimneys, overshadowed with trees, smoke
incessantly, and fill the room with smother. To avoid the draught, many of
the cottages are fitted with wooden screens, which divide the room, small
enough before, into two parts, the outer of which, towards the door, is a
howling wilderness of draught and wet from under the door; and the inner
part close, stuffy, and dim with smoke driven down the chimney by the
shifting wind. Here the family are all huddled up together close over the
embers. Here the cooking is done, such as it is. Here they sit in the dark, or
in such light as is supplied by the carefully hoarded stock of fuel, till it is
time to go to bed, and that is generally early enough. So rigid is the
economy practised in many of these cottages that a candle is rarely if ever
used. The light of the fire suffices, and they find their beds in the dark. Even
when a labourer has risen in the scale, and has some small property, the
enforced habits of early life cling to him; and I have frequently found men
who were really worth some little money sitting at eight o'clock on a dark
winter's night without a candle or lamp, their feet close to a few dying
embers. The older people especially go to bed early. Going to some cottages
once for a parish paper that had been circulated for signature, I rapped at the
closed door. This was at half-past seven one evening in November. Again
and again I hammered at the door; at last an old woman put her head out of
window, and the following colloquy ensued:—
"What do 'ee want?"
"The paper; have you signed it?"
"Lor, I doan't know. He's on the table—a bin ther ever since a come. Thee's
can lift th' latch an' take 'un. We bin gone to bed this two hours."
They must have gone upstairs at half-past five. To rise at five of a summer's
morning, and see the azure of the sky and the glorious sun, may be,

perhaps, no great hardship, although there are few persons who could long
remain poetical on bread and cheese. But to rise at five on a dark winter's
morning is a very different affair. To put on coarse nailed boots, weighing
fully seven pounds, gaiters up above the knee, a short greatcoat of some
heavy material, and to step out into the driving rain and trudge wearily over
field after field of wet grass, with the furrows full of water; then to sit on a
three-legged stool, with mud and manure half-way up the ankles, and milk
cows with one's head leaning against their damp, smoking hides for two
hours, with the rain coming steadily drip, drip, drip—this is a very different
affair.
The "fogger" on a snowy morning in the winter has to encounter about the
most unpleasant circumstances imaginable. Icicles hang from the eaves of
the rick, and its thatch is covered with snow. Up the slippery ladder in the
dark morning, one knee out upon the snow-covered thatch, he plunges the
broad hay-knife in and cuts away an enormous truss—then a great prong is
stuck into this, a prong made on purpose, with extra thick and powerful
handle, and the truss, well bound round with a horse-hair rope, is hoisted on
the head and shoulders. This heavy weight the fogger has to carry perhaps
half-a-mile through the snow; the furrows in the field are frozen over, but
his weight crashes through the ice, slush into the chilly water. Rain, snow,
or bitter frost, or still more bitter east winds—"harsh winds," as he most
truly calls them—the fogger must take no heed of either, for the cows must
be fed.
A quart of threepenny ale for breakfast, with a hunch of bread and cheese,
then out to work again in the weather, let it be what it may. The cowyards
have to be cleaned out—if not done before breakfast—the manure thrown
up into heaps, and the heaps wheeled outside. Or, perhaps, the master has
given him a job of piece-work to fill up the middle of the day with—a
hedge to cut and ditch. This means more slush, wet, cold, and discomfort.
About six or half-past he reaches home, thoroughly saturated, worn-out,
cross, and "dummel." I don't know how to spell that word, nor what its
etymology may be, but it well expresses the dumb, sullen churlishness
which such a life as this engenders. For all the conditions and circumstances
of such a life tend to one end only—the blunting of all the finer feelings, the
total erasure of sensitiveness. The coarse, half-cooked cabbage, the small
bit of fat and rafty bacon, the dry bread and pint of weak tea, makes no very

hearty supper after such a day as this. The man grows insensible to the
weather, so cold and damp; his bodily frame becomes crusted over, case-
hardened; and with this indifference there rises up at the same time a
corresponding dulness as regards all moral and social matters.
Generally the best conditions of cottage life are to be found wherever there
are, say, three or four great, tall, strong, unmarried sons lodging in the
house with their aged parents. Each of these pays a small sum weekly for
his lodging, and often an additional sum for the bare necessaries of life. In
the aggregate this mounts up to a considerable sum, and whatever is bought
is equally shared by the parents. They live exceedingly well. Such young
men as these earn good wages, and now and then make extra time, and
come home with a pocketful of money. Even after the inevitable alehouse
has claimed its share, there still remains enough to purchase fresh meat for
supper; and it is not at all unusual in such cottages to find the whole family
supping at seven (it is, in fact, dining) on a fairly good joint of mutton, with
every species of common vegetables. In one case that was brought under
my notice three brothers lived with their aged mother. They were all strong,
hard-working men, and tolerably steady. In that cottage there were no less
than four separate barrels of beer, and all on tap. Four barrels in one cottage
seems an extraordinary thing, yet it resolved itself very simply. The cottage
was the mother's; they gave her so much for lodging, and she had her own
barrel of beer, so that there should be no dispute. The three brothers were
mowers—mowers drink enormous quantities of liquor—and with the same
view to prevent dispute each had his own especial barrel. Families like this
live fairly well, and have many little comforts. Still, at the best, in winter it
is a rough and uncomfortable existence.
In the life of the English agricultural labourers there is absolutely no poetry,
no colour. Even their marriages—times when if ever in life poetry will
manifest itself—are sober, dull, tame, clumsy, and colourless. I say sober in
the sense of tint, for to get drunk appears to be the one social pleasure of the
marriage-day. They, of course, walk to church; but then that walk usually
leads across fields full of all the beauties of the spring or the summer. There
is nothing in the walk itself to flatten down the occasion. But the procession
is so dull—so utterly ungenial—a stranger might pass it without guessing
that a wedding was toward. Except a few rude jests; except that there is an
attempt to walk arm-in-arm (it is only an attempt, for they forget to allow

for each other's motions); except the Sunday dresses, utterly devoid of taste,
what is there to distinguish this day from the rest? There is the drunken
carousal, it is true, all the afternoon and evening. There are no fête days in
the foreign sense in the English labourer's life. There are the fairs and
feasts, and a fair is the most melancholy of sights. Showmen's vans, with
pictures outside of unknown monsters; merry-go-rounds, nut stalls,
gingerbread stalls, cheap Jacks, and latterly photographic "studios"; behind
all these the alehouse; the beating of drums and the squalling of pigs, the
blowing of horns, and the neighing of horses trotted out for show, the roar
of a rude crowd—these constitute a country fair. There is no colour—
nothing flowery or poetical about this festival of the labourer.
The village feasts are still less interesting. Here and there the clergyman of
the parish has succeeded in turning what was a rude saturnalia into a
decorous "fête," with tea in a tent. But generally the feasts are falling into
rapid disuse, and would perhaps have died away altogether had not the
benefit societies often chosen that day for their annual club-dinner. A
village feast consists of two or three gipsies located on the greensward by
the side of the road, and displaying ginger-beer, nuts, and toys for sale; an
Aunt Sally; and, if the village is a large one, the day may be honoured by
the presence of what is called a rifle-gallery; the "feast" really and truly
does not exist. Some two or three of the old-fashioned farmers have the
traditional roast beef and plum-pudding on that day, and invite a few
friends; but this custom is passing away. In what the agricultural labourer's
feast nowadays consists no one can tell. It is an excuse for an extra quart or
two of beer, that is all.
This dulness is not, perhaps, the fault of the labourer. It may be that it is the
fault of the national character, shown more broadly in the lower class of the
population. Speaking nationally, we have no fête days—there is no colour
in our mode of life. These English agricultural labourers have no passion
plays, no peasant plays, no rustic stage and drama, few songs, very little
music. The club dinner is the real fête of the labourer; he gets plenty to eat
and drink for that day. It is this lack of poetical feeling that makes the
English peasantry so uninteresting a study. They have no appreciation of
beauty. Many of them, it is true, grow quantities of flowers; but barely one
in a thousand could arrange those flowers in a bouquet.

The alehouse forms no inconsiderable part of the labourer's life. It is at once
his stock exchange, his reading-room, his club, and his assembly rooms. It
is here that his benefit society holds its annual dinner. The club meetings
take place weekly or monthly in the great room upstairs. Here he learns the
news of the day; the local papers are always to be found at the public-house,
and if he cannot read himself he hears the news from those who can. In the
winter he finds heat and light, too often lacking at home; at all times he
finds amusement; and who can blame him for seizing what little pleasure
lies in his way? As a rule the beerhouse is the only place of amusement to
which he can resort: it is his theatre, his music-hall, picture-gallery, and
Crystal Palace. The recent enactments bearing upon the licensed victuallers
have been rather hard upon the agricultural labourer. No doubt they are very
excellent enactments, especially those relating to early closing; but in the
villages and outlying rural districts, where life is reduced to its most rude
and simple form, many of the restrictions are unjust, and deprive the
labourer of what he feels to be his legitimate right. Playing at nine-pins, for
instance, is practically forbidden, so also dominoes. Now, it was a great
thing to put down skittle-sharping and cheating at gambling generally—a
good thing to discourage gambling in every form—but in these thinly-
populated outlying agricultural parishes, where money is scarce and wages
low, there never existed any temptation to allure skittle-sharpers and similar
cheaters to the spot. The game at skittles was a legitimate game—a fair and
honest struggle of skill and strength. Nine times out of ten it was played
only for a quart of ale, to be drunk by the loser as well as the winner in
good fellowship. Why deprive the man who labours all day in wet and
storm of so simple a pleasure in the evening? The conditions are very
different to those existing in large manufacturing towns, and some
modification of the law ought to be made. The agricultural labourer has no
cheap theatre at which he can spend an hour, no music-hall, no reading-
room; his only resource is the public-house. Now that he is practically
deprived of his skittles and such games, he has no amusement left except to
drink, or play at pitch and toss on the quiet, a far worse pastime than
skittles. Skittles, of course, are allowed provided the players play for love
only; but what public-house keeper cares to put up the necessary
arrangements on such terms? The labourer will have his quart in the
evening, and, despite of all "cry" to the contrary, I believe it to be his right
to have that quart; and it is better, if he must have it, that his whole thoughts

should not be concentrated on the liquor—that he should earn it by skill and
strength. There is an opprobrium about the public-house, and let us grant
that it is at least partially deserved—but where else is the labourer to go?
He cannot for ever work all day and sit in his narrow cabin in the evening.
He cannot always read, and those of his class who do read do so
imperfectly. A reading-room has been tried, but as a rule it fails to attract
the purely agricultural labourer. The shoemaker, the tailor, the village post-
master, grocer, and such people may use it; also a few of the better-educated
of the young labourers, the rising generation; but not the full-grown
labourer with a wife and family and cottage. It does good undoubtedly; in
the future, as education extends, it will become a place of resort. But at
present it fails to reach the adult genuine agricultural labourer. For a short
period in the dead of the winter the farmers and gentry get up penny
readings in many places, but these are confined to at most one evening a
week. What, then, is the labourer to do? Let any one put himself in his
place, try to realise his feelings and circumstances. At present, till education
extends, he must go to the public-house. Is he to be punished and deprived
of his game of skill because in large towns it bears evil fruit? Surely the law
could be somewhat modified, and playing permitted under some
restrictions.
The early closing has been an unalloyed good in these rural districts. The
labourer is a steady drinker. He does not toss down glasses of stiff brandy
and whisky. His beer requires time to produce an effect. The last hour does
the mischief. Since the earlier closing the village streets have been
comparatively free from drunken men. In any case, the agricultural labourer
is the most lamb-like of drunkards. He interferes with no one. He unhinges
no gates, smashes no windows, does no injury. He either staggers home or
quietly lies on the grass till the liquor passes off. He is not a quarrelsome
man. He does not fight with knuckle-dusters or kick with his heavy boots.
His fights, when he does fight, are very harmless affairs. No doubt his
drunkenness is an offence; but it is comparatively innocuous to the general
public.
Religious feeling does not run high among the labourers. A large proportion
of them are Nonconformists—principally Methodists. But this is not out of
any very decided notion as to the difference of ceremony or theological
dogma; it arises out of a class feeling. They say, or rather they feel, that this

is their church. The parish church is the church of the farmers and the
gentry. There is no hostility to the clergyman of the parish, no bitter warfare
of sect against sect, or of Methodist against Churchman. But you see very
few of the farmers go to chapel. The labourer goes there, and finds his own
friends—his cousins and uncles—his wife's relations. He is among his own
class. There is no feeling of inferiority. The religion taught, the service, the
hymns, the preacher, all are his. He has a sense of proprietorship in them.
He helps to pay for them. The French peasant replied to the English tourist,
who expressed surprise at the fanatic love of the populace for the first
Napoleon—"he was as much a tyrant as King Louis was." "Ah, but
Napoleon was our king." So the labourers feel that this is their religion.
Therefore it is that so many of them gather together (where there are no
chapels) in the cottage of some man who takes the lead, and sit, with doors
and windows shut, crammed together to pray and listen to others pray. Any
of them who wishes can, as it were, ascend the pulpit here. This is why in
so many parishes the pews of the parish church are comparatively empty so
far as agricultural labourers are concerned. The best of clergymen must fail
to fill them under such disadvantages.
It is very difficult not only for the clergyman, but for others who wish to
improve the condition of the labourer, to reach him. Better cottages are, of
course, a most effectual way, but it is not in the power of every one to
confer so substantial a benefit. Perhaps one of the best means devised has
been that of cottage flower-shows. These are, of course, not confined to
flowers; in fact, the principal part of such shows consists of table vegetables
and fruit. By rigidly excluding all gardeners, and all persons not strictly
cottage people, the very best results have often been arrived at in this way.
For if there is one thing in which the labourer takes an interest it is his
garden and his allotment. To offer him prizes for the finest productions of
his garden touches the most sensitive part of his moral organisation. It is
wonderful what an amount of emulation these prizes excite—emulation not
so much for the value of the prize as for the distinction. These competitions
tend besides to provide him with a better class of food, for he depends
largely upon vegetables.
There is nothing connected with the condition of the agricultural poor that
is better worth the attention of improvers than the style of cookery pursued
in these cottages. A more wretched cookery probably does not exist on the

face of the earth. The soddened cabbage is typical of the whole thing. Since
higher wages have come in it has become possible for the labourer in many
cases to provide himself with better food, such as mutton—the cheap parts
—more bacon, pork, and so on; but the women do not know how to make
the most of it. It is very difficult to lay down a way in which this defect may
be remedied; for there is nothing a man, let him be never so poor, so deeply
resents as an inspection of the contents of his pot. He would sooner eat half-
raw bacon than have the teaching forced on him—how to make savoury
meals of the simple provisions within his reach; nor can he be blamed for
this sturdy independent feeling. Possibly the establishment of schools of
cookery in villages might do much good. They might be attached to the new
schools now building throughout the country. The labourer, from so long
living upon coarse, ill-cooked food, acquires an artificial taste. Some men
eat their bacon raw; others will drink large quantities of vinegar, and well
they may need it to correct by its acidity the effects of strong unwholesome
cabbage. The cottage cook has no idea of those nutritious and pleasant
soups which can be made to form so important a feature in the economy of
daily life.
The labourer is in a lower degree of the same class as the third-rate working
farmer of the past. He is the old small dairy farmer in a coarser shape. With
a little less education, ruder manners, with the instincts of eating, drinking,
and avarice more prominently displayed, he presents in his actual condition
at this day a striking analogy to the agriculturist of a bygone time. In fact,
those farmers of twenty or thirty acres, living in cottage-like homesteads,
were barely distinguishable as far as personnel went from the labourers
among whom they lived. This being the case, it is not surprising to find that
the labourer of this day presents in general characteristics a marked affinity
in ideas and sentiments to those entertained by the old farmer. He has the
same paternal creed in a more primeval form. He considers his children as
his absolute property. He rules them with a rod of iron, or rather of ground-
ash. In fact, the ground-ash stick is his social religion. The agricultural
labouring poor are very rough and even brutal towards their children. Not
that they are without affection towards them, but they are used to thrash
them into obedience instead of leading them into it by the gentle means of
moral persuasion.

Bystanders would call the agricultural labourer cruel. Carters, for instance,
had till lately a habit of knocking the boys under their control about in a
brutal manner. But I do not think that in the mass of cases it arose from
deliberate cruelty, but from a species of stolid indifference or insensibility
to suffering. Somehow they do not seem to understand that others suffer,
whether this arises from the rough life they lead, the endless battle with the
weather, the hard fare—whether it has grown up out of the circumstances
surrounding them. The same unfeeling brutality often extends to the cattle
under their care. In this there has been a decided improvement of late years;
but it is not yet extinct.
These are some of the lights and shades of the labourer's daily life
impartially presented.

FIELD-FARING WOMEN.
If a thoughtful English peasant-woman rejoiced that in her house a son was
born, it would be, not because "she had gotten a man from the Lord," but a
thanksgiving that it was not a girl. That most natural thanksgiving of the
Hebrew woman is too rarely heard in the rural cottage, situated though it
may be in the midst of meadows and fields abounding with the fat of the
earth. The fact that a fresh being has entered upon life, with all its glorious
possibilities, is not a subject for joy.
"Well, John," the farmer says to his man, "your wife has been confined,
hasn't she? How's the young one?"
"Aw, sir, a' be main weak and pickèd, an' like to go back—thank God!"
replies the labourer with intense satisfaction, especially if he has two or
three children already. "Pickèd" means thin, sharp-featured, wasted,
emaciated. "To go back" is to die. The man does not like to say "die,"
therefore he puts it "to go back"—i.e., whence it came; from the unknown.
Yet, with all this hard indifference, the labourer is as fond of his children as
any one else. The "ego" that utters those apparently heartless words is not
the real man, it is the "ego" produced by long experience of the hardships of
poverty; of coarse fare, rude labour, exposure. After all, it is in a spirit of
tenderness towards the infant that the parent half desires it to die. The real
"ego," the true man, delights as all humanity does in watching the growth of
the tiny limbs, the expansion of the instincts into mind, and the first
employment of that mind. He feels as Marguerite in Faust felt, tending the
babe—"the holiest of all joys." But life is very, very hard, and
circumstances push him out of himself. Still more do these hardships tell
upon his wife; and so it is, knowing what her sex have to go through, that
she welcomes a boy more than a girl. An aged agricultural woman said she
would sooner have seven boys than one girl; for the former, when they
became lads, went out and earned their own living, but the girls you never
knew when they were got rid of—they were always coming back. This
expressed the practical view of the matter. But supposing that the child
should prove a girl; it must not be imagined that it receives any ruder

treatment in mere infancy than a boy would have had. In early infancy
children have no sex. But the poor mother has her trials. Though in the
midst of a country teeming with milk, it is often with the utmost difficulty
that she can obtain any for her babe, if Nature shall have rendered her
dependent upon artificial supply. This has become especially the case of late
years, now that so much milk is sent to London, instead of being retained in
the dairy for the manufacture of butter and cheese. So that it actually
happens that the poor mother in the courts of the metropolis can obtain milk
easier than her far-away sister in those fabulous fields which the city
woman has never seen, and, perhaps, never will. Often in arable districts
there are scarcely any cows kept. No one cares to retail a pennyworth of
milk. It is only by favour, through the interest taken by some farmer's wife,
that it can be got.
Very few agricultural women have a medical man present at their
confinement; they usually entrust themselves to the care of some village
nurse, who has a reputation for skill in such matters, but no scientifically
acquired knowledge—who proceeds by rule of thumb. The doctor—almost
always the parish doctor, though sometimes the club officer—is not called
in till after the delivery. The poor woman will frequently come downstairs
on the fourth day; and it is to this disregard of proper precautions that the
distortions of figure and many of the illnesses of poor agricultural women
are attributable. Nothing but the severe training they have gone through
from childhood upwards—the exposure to all kinds of weather—the life in
the open air, the physical strength induced by labour, can enable them to
support the strain upon the frame caused by so quickly endeavouring to
resume their household duties. It is probably this reserve of strength which
enables them to recover from so serious a matter so quickly. Certain it is
that very few die from confinement; and yet, from the point of view of the
middle class of society, almost every precaution and every luxury by them
deemed necessary is omitted. Of course, in some instances, agricultural
women whose husbands have, perhaps, worked for one master from
boyhood, receive much more attention than here indicated—wines, jellies,
meat, and so on—but the majority have to rely upon the tender mercies of
the parish. It has been often remarked that the labourer, let him be in receipt
of what wages he will, makes no provision for this, the most serious and
interesting of all domestic events. Though it can be foreseen for months, he

does not save a single sovereign. He does not consider it in the least
shameful to receive parish relief on these occasions; he leaves his partner
entirely to the mercy of strangers, and were it not for the clergyman's wife,
she would frequently be without sympathy. There are no matters in which
so much practical good is accomplished by the wives of the rural clergy as
in these confinements of the poor women in their parishes. It is a matter
peculiarly within their sphere, and, to their honour be it spoken, one which
they carry out to the utmost of their ability.
A cottage is at best a wretched place to be ill in. It is a marvel how many
poor women escape at all, from the close atmosphere of the low-pitched
holes in which they are confined. It is a wonder that, among the many
schemes of philanthropy which have attracted attention of late years,
something has not been done for these poor creatures. Why should not
every large village or cluster of villages—there are often three or four
within a mile or two—have their lying-in hospitals, on the cottage hospital
system? Scarcely any parish but has its so-called charities—money left by
misguided but benevolent persons, for the purpose of annual distribution in
small doles of groats, or loaves, or blankets. Often there is a piece of land
called "Poor's Mead," or some similar name, which has been devised like
this, the annual rent from it to be applied for the poor. As it is, the benefit
from these charities is problematical. If they were combined, and the
aggregate funds applied to maintain a lying-in hospital for the district, a real
and efficient good would be arrived at. But of all places, villages are
neglected. Let it be drainage, water supply, allotments—anything and
everything—the villages go on as they may, the fault being the absence of
local authority. There are plenty of gentlemen ready and willing to take part
in and advance such schemes, but there is no combination. Spontaneous
combination is uncertain in its operation. If there were some system of
village self-government, these wants would be soon supplied. It is true that
there is the Union Workhouse. A poor woman can go to the workhouse; but
is it right, is it desirable from any point of view, that decent women should
be driven to the workhouse at such times? As a matter of fact, it is only the
unfortunates who have illegitimate children that use the workhouse lying-in
wards. Such an institution as has been suggested would be gladly welcomed
by the agricultural poor. Most cottages have but two bedrooms, some only
one; a better class of cottage is now being gradually erected with three, but

even in these the third is very small. Now, take the case of a labouring man
with seven or eight children, and living in a cottage with two bedrooms, and
whose wife is confined; and let it be remembered that large families are
common amongst this class. The wife must certainly have one room to
herself and her attendant. The father, then, and his children must crowd into
the other, or sleep as they can on the ground-floor. In the case of nearly
grown-up children the overcrowding is a serious matter. The relief afforded
by a lying-in hospital would be immense; and the poor woman herself
would be restored to her family with her health firmly re-established,
whereas now she often lingers in a sickly state for months.
In the soft, warm summer-time, when the midsummer hum of the myriads
of insects in the air sheds a drowsy harmony over the tree-tops, the field-
faring woman goes out to haymaking, and leaves her baby in the shade by
the hedge-side. A wooden sheepcage, turned upside down and filled with
new-made hay, forms not at all a despicable cradle; and here the little thing
lies on its back and inhales the fresh pure air, and feels the warmth of the
genial sun, cheered from time to time by visits from its busy mother.
Perhaps this is the only true poetry of the hayfield, so much talked of and
praised. The mother works with her rake, or with a shorter, smaller prong;
and if it is a large farm, the women are kept as much as possible together,
for their strength and skill will not allow them to work at the same pace as
the men, and if they work in company the one hinders the other. A man can
do the work of two women, and do it better in every way, besides being
capable of the heavier tasks of pitching, cock-making, &c., which the
women cannot manage. Before the haymaking machines and horse-rakes
came into vogue, it was not uncommon to see as many as twenty women
following each other in échelon, turning a "wallow," or shaking up the
green swathes left by the mowers. Farmers were obliged to employ them,
but were never satisfied with their work, which was the dearest they paid
for. Somehow, there was no finish to it. Large numbers of women still work
in the hayfield, but they are not used in gangs so much as formerly, but
distributed about to do light jobs for which a man cannot be spared, and in
these they are useful. The pay used to be tenpence a day; now it is one
shilling and a pint of beer per day, and in some places fifteenpence. The
Arcadian innocence of the hayfield, sung by the poets, is the most barefaced
fiction; for those times are the rural saturnalia, and the broadest and coarsest

of jokes and insinuations are freely circulated; nor does it always stop at
language only, provided the master be out of sight. Matrons and young girls
alike come in for an equal share of this rude treatment, and are quite a
match for the men in the force of compliment. The women leave work an
hour or so before the men, except when there is a press, and the farmer is
anxious to get in the hay before a storm comes. It is not that the hayfield
itself originates this coarseness but this is almost the only time of the year
when the labouring classes work together in large numbers. A great deal of
farm-work is comparatively solitary; in harvest droves of people are
collected together, and the inherent vulgarity comes out more strongly. At
the wheat-harvest the women go reaping, and exceedingly hard they work
at it. There is no harder work done under the sun than reaping, if it is well
followed up. From earliest dawn to latest night they swing the sickles,
staying with their husbands, and brothers, and friends, till the moon silvers
the yellow corn. The reason is because reaping is piece-work, and not paid
by the day, so that the longer and the harder they work the more money is
earned. In this a man's whole family can assist. His wife, his grown-up sons
and daughters cut the corn, the younger ones can carry it and aid in various
ways.
It is wonderful how the men stand the excessive and continuous labour; it is
still more wonderful how the women endure it, trying as it is to the back. It
is the hottest season of the year—the early autumn; the sun burns and
scorches, and the warm wind gives no relief; even the evenings are close
and sultry. The heated earth reflects the rays, and the straw is dry and warm
to the touch. The standing corn, nearly as high as the reaper, keeps off the
breeze, if there is any, from her brow. Grasping the straw continuously cuts
and wounds the hand, and even gloves will hardly give perfect protection.
The woman's bare neck is turned to the colour of tan; her thin muscular
arms bronze right up to the shoulder. Short time is allowed for refreshment;
right through the hottest part of the day they labour. It is remarkable that
none, or very few, cases of sunstroke occur. Cases of vertigo and vomiting
are frequent, but pass off in a few hours. Large quantities of liquor are taken
to sustain the frame weakened by perspiration.
When night does arrive, even then the task is not over, for they have to
carry home on their heads the bundle of wheat gleaned by the smaller
children, and perhaps walk two miles to the cottage. This is indeed work for

a woman still suckling her child. It is not easy to calculate what a woman
earns at such seasons, because they rarely work on their own account: either
the father or the husband receives the wages in a lump with his own; but it
cannot be much less than that earned by a man; for at these times they work
with a will, and they do not at the haymaking. While reaping the baby is
nestled down on a heap of coats or shawls under the shelter of the shocks of
corn, which form a little hut for it, and, as in the hayfield, is watched by one
of the children. Often three or four women will place their babies close
together, and leave one great girl in charge of the whole, which is an
economy, releasing other children for work; for the hayfield and the corn-
harvest are the labourer's gold-mine. There is not so much rough joking in
the corn-field; they do not work so close together, and the husband or father
is near at hand; neither is there time nor inclination in the midst of such
severe labour, to which haymaking is play.
Harvest-homes are going out of fashion. After one of these feasts there was
often much that was objectionable; and, wherever possible, farmers have
abolished them, giving a small sum of money instead; but in places the
labourers grumble greatly at the change, preferring the bacon and the beer,
and the unrestrained license. It is noticeable how the women must have
their tea. If it is far from home, the children collect sticks, and a fire is made
in a corner of the field, and the kettle boiled; and about four o'clock they
take a cup in company—always weak tea, with a little brown sugar and no
milk, and usually small pieces of bread sopped in it, especially by the elder
women. Tea is largely used by the agricultural labourers, though it does not
by any means prevent them from indulging in beer. Snuff is not taken by the
women half so much as formerly, though some of the old ones are very fond
of it.
As soon as ever the child is old enough to crawl about, it is sure to get out
into the road and roll in the dust. It is a curious fact that the agricultural
children, with every advantage of green fields and wide open downs,
always choose the dusty hard road to play in. They are free to wander as
they list over mead and leaze, and pluck the flowers out of the hedges, and
idle by the brooks, all the year round, the latter part of the spring, when the
grass is nearly fit for mowing, only excepted. Yet, excepting a few of the
elder boys birdnesting, it is the rarest thing to meet a troop of children in the
fields; but there they are in the road, the younger ones sprawling in the dust,

their naked limbs kicking it up in clouds, and the bigger boys clambering
about in the hedge-mound bounding the road, making gaps, splashing in the
dirty water of the ditches. Hardy young dogs one and all. Their food is of
the rudest and scantiest, chiefly weak tea, without milk, sweetened with
moist sugar, and hunches of dry bread, sometimes with a little lard, or, for a
treat, with treacle. Butter is scarcely ever used in the agricultural labourer's
cottage. It is too dear by far, and if he does buy fats, he believes in the fats
expressed from meats, and prefers lard or dripping. Children are frequently
fed with bread and cheap sugar spread on it. This is much cheaper than
butter. Sometimes they get a bit of cheese or bacon, but not often, and a
good deal of strong cabbage, soddened with pot-liquor. The elder boys get a
little beer; the young girls none, save perhaps a sip from their mother's pint,
in summer. This is what they have to build up a frame on capable of
sustaining heat and cold, exposure, and a life of endless labour. The boys it
seems to suit, for they are generally tolerably plump, though always very
short for their age. Frequently teams of powerful horses drawing immense
loads of hay or straw may be seen on the highway, in the charge of a boy
who does not look ten years old judged by the town standard, but who is
really fifteen. These short, broad, stout lads, look able to stand anything,
and in point of fact do stand it, from the kick of a carter's heavy boot to the
long and bitter winter. If it is wished to breed up a race of men literally
"hard as nails," no better process could be devised; but, looked at from a
mental and moral point of view, there may be a difference of opinion.
The girls do not appear to thrive so well upon this dietary. They are as tall
as the boys, taller if anything considering the ages, but thin and skinny,
angular and bony. At seven or eight years old the girl's labour begins.
Before that she has been set to mind the baby, or watch the pot, and to scour
about the hedges for sticks for the fire. Now she has not only to mind the
baby, but to nurse it; she carries it about with her in her arms; and really the
infant looks almost as large as herself, and its weight compels her to lean
backwards. She is left at home all day in charge of the baby, the younger
children, and the cottage. Perhaps a little bread is left for them to eat, but
they get nothing more till the mother returns about half-past four, when,
woe be to the girl if the fire is not lit, and the kettle on. The girl has to fetch
the water—often a hard and tedious task, for many villages have a most
imperfect supply, and you may see the ditches by the roadside dammed up

to yield a little dirty water. She may have to walk half-a-mile to the brook,
and then carry the bucket home as best she may, and repeat the operation till
sufficient has been acquired; and when her mother is washing, or, still
worse, is a washerwoman by profession, this is her weary trudge all day. Of
course there are villages where water is at hand, and sometimes too much of
it. I know a large village where the brook runs beside the highway, and you
have to pass over a "drock," or small bridge, to get to each of the cottages;
but such instances are rare. The girl has also to walk into the adjacent town
and bring back the bread, particularly if her mother happens to be receiving
parish pay. A little older—at ten or eleven, or twelve—still more skinny and
bony now as a rule, she follows her mother to the fields, and learns to pick
up stones from the young mowing grass, and place them in heaps to be
carted away to mend drinking places for cattle. She learns to beat clots and
spread them with a small prong; she works in the hayfield, and gleans at the
corn-harvest. Gleaning—poetical gleaning—is the most unpleasant and
uncomfortable of labour, tedious, slow, back-aching work; picking up ear
by ear the dropped wheat, searching among the prickly stubble.
Notwithstanding all her labour, and the hardship she has to endure—coarse
fare, and churlish treatment at the hands of those who should love her most
—the little agricultural girl still retains some of that natural inclination
towards the pretty and romantic inherent in the sex. In the spring she makes
daisy chains, and winds them round the baby's neck; or with the stalks of
the dandelion makes a chain several feet in length. She plucks great
bunches of the beautiful bluebell, and of the purple orchis of the meadow;
gathers heaps of the cowslip, and after playing with them a little while, they
are left to wither in the dust by the roadside, while she is sent two or three
miles with her father's dinner. She chants snatches of rural songs, and
sometimes three or four together, joining hands, dance slowly round and
round, singing slowly rude rhymes describing marriage—and not over
decent some of these rhymes are. She has no toys—not one in twenty such
girls ever have a doll; or, if they do, it is but some stick dressed in a rag.
Poor things! they need no artificial dolls; so soon as ever they can lift it,
they are trusted with the real baby. Her parents probably do not mean to be
unkind, and use makes this treatment bearable, but to an outsider it seems
unnecessarily rough, and even brutal. Her mother shouts at her in a shrill

treble perpetually; her father enforces his orders with a harsh oath and a
slap.
The pressure of hard circumstances, the endless battle with poverty, render
men and women both callous to others' feelings, and particularly strict to
those over whom they possess unlimited authority. But the labourer must
not be judged too harshly: there is a scale in these matters; a proportion as
in everything else; an oath from him, and even a slap on the ear, is really the
counterpart of the frown and emphasised words of a father in a more
fortunate class of life; and the children do not feel it, or think it
exceptionally cruel, as the children of a richer man would. Undoubtedly,
however, it does lessen the bond between child and parent. There is little
filial affection among these cottagers—how should there be? The boy is
driven away from home as early as possible; the girl is made day by day to
feel her fault in being a girl; to neither can the poor man give any small
present, or any occasional treat. What love there is lasts longest between the
mother and her daughter. The only way in which a labourer exhibits his
affection is when another labourer in authority, as a carter, ill-treats his boy
—a too common case—and then he speaks loudly, and very properly. But
even in most serious matters there is a strange callousness. I have known
instances in which a father, aware that a criminal assault has been attempted
by another labourer upon a tender child of twelve, has refused to prosecute,
and the brutal offender would have escaped without the slightest
punishment had not the clergyman heard of the story.
The slow years roll by—they are indeed slow in an agricultural village—
and the girl, now fifteen, has to go regularly to work in the fields; that is, if
the family be not meantime largely increased. She has in this latter case
plenty of work at home to assist her mother. Cottagers are not over-clean,
but they are not wilfully dirty in their houses; and with a large family there
is much washing and other domestic matters to attend to, which the mother,
now fast growing feeble, cannot get through herself. In harvest the women
get up at four or earlier, and do their household work before starting for the
fields. But, perhaps, by this time another girl has grown up sufficiently to
nurse baby, mind the young ones, and do slave's work generally. Then the
elder daughter goes to the fields daily when there is work to be had. In
arable districts the women do much work, picking couch grass—a tedious
operation—and hoeing. They never or rarely milk now. In the dead of

winter there is nothing for women to do. At this age—fifteen or sixteen—
the girl perhaps goes out to service at some farmhouse. If she is fortunate
enough to enter the house of one of the modern class of farmers, it is a
lucky day for her when she begins indoor labour. It is to be feared that the
life of a girl of this kind in the old time, and not so long ago, in the houses
of the poorer order of farmers, was a rough one indeed. But much of that is
past, never to return, and our business is with the present. Where they have
a dairy she has to clean the buckets and milk-cans and other utensils, to help
turn the cheeses, and assist the dairymaid (a most important personage this
last) in all kinds of ways. The work is coarse and rude, but it only lasts a
portion of the day, and she has regular and ample meals. The bacon and
cheese soon begin to tell upon her. The angular bones disappear, the skinny
arms grow round, and presently enormously fat—not much the prettier,
perhaps, but far more pleasant to look at. Her face loses the pinched
expression; her cheeks become full, and round, and rosy; in every way her
physical frame improves. It is wonderful what a difference a few months in
a good farmhouse makes to a girl of this kind. She soon begins to dress
better, not from her wages, for these are small enough, and may commence
as low as £4; but her mistress gives her many things, and, if she is a good
girl, buys her a dress now and then; and with the shilling or two she asks in
advance, she purchases cheap ornaments of the pedlar at the door. Her life
is low enough socially—it is almost an annual round of working, eating,
and sleeping (no one sleeps like a farm-wench); but it is an infinite
improvement upon the struggle for existence at the cottage. She has no
trouble, no thought, no care now. Her mistress may snap occasionally, her
master may grumble, and the dairymaid may snarl; but there are no slaps on
the ear, no kicks, no going to bed supperless. In summer she goes out in the
afternoon haymaking as an extra hand, but only works a few hours, and it is
really only a relaxation. She picks up some knowledge of cooking, learns
how to make herself useful in the house, and in the course of a year or two,
if moderately sharp, is capable of rising a degree, and obtaining a better
salary as a maid-servant, having nothing to do with a dairy. The four or five
pounds with which she commences may seem a very low sum, but the state
of her domestic education at the time must be taken into consideration. She
has to learn everything. All the years spent in working in the cottage at
home have to be unlearnt—all the old habits replaced by new ones. After
the first year or so her value rises considerably; she may continue in the

house at a higher salary, or go into the town as maid-servant in a
tradesman's family. A large proportion of servant-girls thus find their way
from the country into the town. With these we have nothing further to do—
they are no longer field-farers. A few after several years learn the art and
mystery of butter and cheese, and become dairymaids; and then, if they are
clever, earn good wages—indeed, fabulous prices are asked by them. There
are not, however, so many dairymaids as formerly, for the small dairies are
getting amalgamated and made into larger ones, and then the farmer, if he
makes butter and cheese, employs a dairyman in preference. This rise to be
maid-servant, or to be dairymaid, is the bright side of the girl's career. There
are darker shades which must be mentioned.
The overcrowding in cottages leads to what may be called an indifference to
decency. It is not that in families decency is wantonly and of a set purpose
disregarded, but stern necessity leads to a coarseness and indelicacy which
hardens the mind and deadens the natural modesty even of the best girls.
Then the low scandals of the village talked over from cottage to cottage, the
rude jokes of the hayfield, the general looseness and indifference which
prevail as to morality, all prepare the girl for the too common fall. If she
remains at home and works in the fields after the age of fifteen, unless
uncommonly strong-minded, it is an open question whether she will or will
not succumb. If she goes into a farmhouse as servant, the chances are in
favour of her escaping temptation. But in farmhouses she may also
sometimes run into the very jaws of danger. It is not uncommon in some
districts for young labourers to sleep in the house, one or two who milk and
have to be on the spot early. These take their supper in the kitchen or the
brewhouse, and, despite the strictest precautions on the part of the mistress,
enjoy plenty of opportunities for flirting with the girl. Young, full of animal
spirits, giddy and ignorant, she thinks no harm of a romp, and finally falls,
and has to leave her service. If a little may be said in favour of the poor
girls, not a word can be said in favour of the agricultural men, who are
immoral almost without exception, and will remain so until a better-
educated generation with more self-respect arises. The number of poor girls,
from fifteen to five-and-twenty, in agricultural parishes who have
illegitimate offspring is extremely large, and is illustrated by the fact that,
out of the marriages that take place—and agricultural poor are a marrying
class—scarcely any occur until the condition of the girl is too manifest to be

any longer concealed. Instances could be mentioned where the clergyman's
wife, with a view to check the immorality around her, has offered a reward
of a piece of furniture to the first married woman who does not bear a child
till nine months after marriage; the custom being within three months. The
frequency of the appeals to the petty sessions in rural districts for orders of
contribution, by young unmarried girls, also illustrates the prevalent
immorality. Of late the magistrates have taken the line of ordering
contributions on a higher scale, on the grounds that the labourer earns larger
wages, and that the cost of living has risen, and also as a check upon the
men. This well-intentioned step has had the precisely opposite effect to
what was wished. The labourer with higher wages feels the demand upon
his pocket but very little more. The cost of living in rural outlying districts
has risen only to a very trifling degree—barely perceptibly, in fact. Bread is
cheap—that is the staple—rents are the same, and there are more allotments
than ever, making vegetables more easy to obtain. The result, therefore, is
this, that the girl feels she can sin with comparative immunity. She is almost
sure to get her order (very few such appeals are refused); let this be
supplemented with some aid from the parish, and she is none the worse off
than before, for there is no prejudice against employing her in the fields.
Should her fall take place with some young farmer's son from whom she
may get a larger contribution in private, or by order of the magistrates, she
is really and truly in a pecuniary sense better off than she was before, for
she has a certain fixed income. The evil is aggravated by the new law,
which enables the order to be extended over a longer term of years than
formerly, so that for fifteen years is a common thing. If it is decided to
recognise immorality, and to provide against the woman being unduly
injured by it, then these orders are certainly the correct procedure; but if it is
desired to suppress it, then they are a total failure. The girl who has had an
illegitimate child is thought very little the worse of by her friends and her
own class, especially if her seducer is a man who can afford to pay for it—
that is the grand point. If she is fool enough to yield to a man who is badly
off, she may be jeered at as a fool, but rarely reprimanded as a sinner, not
even by her own mother. Such things are not looked upon by the rural poor
as sins, but as accidents of their condition.
It is easy to be hard upon the poor girls, but consider their training. Many of
them cannot read or write; how many even can sew well? The cottage girl is

always a poor hand at her needle, and has to be taught by the elder servants
when she first goes into her place. Accustomed from childhood to what
would be considered abominable indecency in a higher class of life;
constantly hearing phrases which it is impossible to allude to; running wild
about the lanes and fields with stalwart young men coarser and ruder than
those at home; seeing other girls none the worse off, and commiserated with
rather than condemned, what wonder is it if the natural result takes place?
The fairs have been credited with much of the mischief, and undoubtedly
they are productive of evil; but if they were abolished, the average would in
all probability remain about the same. The evil is inherent, and does not
depend upon circumstances. It is the outcome of a long series of
generations; it cannot be overcome in a decade. Education will do much,
but not all. Youth is always led by the tone of the elder people. Until the
tone of the parent is improved, the conduct of the young will remain much
the same. The more distant a parish from a town, the more outlying and
strictly agricultural, and therefore stagnant, the greater the immorality. It is
the one blot upon the character of the agricultural poor. They are not
thieves, they are not drunkards; if they do drink they are harmless, and it
evaporates in shouting and slang. They are not riotous; but the immorality
cannot be gainsaid. No specific cure for this state of things can be devised:
it must slowly work itself out under the gradual pressure of an advancing
social state. It will be slow; for, up to the present, the woman has had but a
small share of the benefit that has befallen the labourer through higher
wages. If higher wages mainly go for drink, the wife at home is not much
the better. The women say themselves they are no better off.
If the girl at eighteen or twenty—in most agricultural marriages the girls are
very young—is fortunate enough to have placed her faith in a man who
redeems his word, then comes the difficulty of the cottage and the furniture
to fill it. Cottages are often difficult to find, especially anywhere near a
man's work, which is the great object. The furniture required is not much,
but there must be some. The labourer does not deal much with the town
furniture-dealer. A great deal of the furniture in cottages has been picked up
at the sales of farmers on quitting their tenancies. Such are the old chairs,
the formal sideboards and eight-day clocks standing in tall, square oaken
cases by the staircase in the cottage. Such, too, are the great wooden
bedsteads of oak or maple upstairs; and from the same source come the

really good feather-beds and blankets. The women—especially the elder
women—go to great trouble, and pinch themselves, to find a way of
purchasing a good bed, and set no small pride upon it. These old oaken
bedsteads, and sideboards, and chairs have perhaps been in the farmhouse
for three or four generations, and are at last sold because the final
representative of the family is imbued with modern ideas, and quits farming
for trade. The cottagers always attend sales like this, and occasionally get
hold of good bargains, and so it is that really good substantial furniture may
often be found in the possession of the better class of labourers. The old
people accumulate these things, and when their sons or daughters marry,
can generally spare a few chairs, a bedstead and bed, and with a little
crockery from other relations, and a few utensils bought in the adjacent
town, the cottage is furnished sufficiently well for a couple whose habits are
necessarily simple. After marriage the hard work of the woman's life really
begins—work compared with which her early experience at home is
nothing; and many, if they have left situations in farmhouses, deeply regret
the change. The labourer can hardly be expected to feel the more exalted
sentiments; and if in the upper classes even it is said that romance ends with
marriage, it is doubly, literally true of the agricultural poor. In addition to
her household work, she has to labour in the fields, or to wash—perhaps
worse than the former alternative; and after a while her husband, too
commonly wearying of his home, in which he finds nothing but a tired
woman and troublesome children, leaves her for the public-house, and
consumes two-thirds of their slender income in beer. The attachment of the
woman for her husband lasts longer than that of the man for the woman.
Even when he has become a confirmed drunkard, and her life with incessant
labour has become a burden to her, she will struggle on, striving to get
bread for the children and the rent for the landlord. She knows that as
evening comes on, instead of sitting down to rest, her duty will be to go
down to the public-house and wait till it pleases her lord and master to try to
stagger home, and then to guide his clumsy steps to the threshold. Of course
there are wives who become as bad as their husbands, who drink, or do
worse, and neglect their homes, but they are the exception. As a rule, the
woman, once married, does her best to keep her home together.
The wife of the labourer does not get her shins smashed with heavy kicks
from hobnailed boots, such as the Lancashire ruffians administer; but,

although serious wife-beating cases are infrequent, there are few women
who escape an occasional blow from their husbands. Most of them get a
moderate amount of thrashing in the course of their lives, and take it much
as they take the hardships and poverty of their condition, as a necessity not
to be escaped. The labourer is not downright brutal to his wife, but he
certainly thinks he has a right to chastise her when she displeases him. Once
in authority, the labourer is stern, hard, and inconsiderate of the feelings of
others, and he is in authority in his own cottage. The wife has been
accustomed to such treatment more or less from her childhood; she has
been slapped and banged about at home, and therefore thinks comparatively
little of a blow from her husband's hand. The man does not mean it so
brutally as it appears to outsiders. This semi-wife-beating is only too
prevalent.
Does the incessant labour undergone by an agricultural woman result in ill
effects to her physical frame? The day-work in the fields, the haymaking,
and such labour as is paid for by the day and not by the piece, cannot do
any injury, for it is light, and the hours are short. In some districts the
women do not come before half-past eight, and leave a little after four, and
they have a long hour out for dinner. It is the piece-work of the corn-harvest
that tries the frame, when work begins at sunrise or shortly after, and lasts
till the latest twilight, and when it is work, real muscular strain. This cannot
but leave its mark. Otherwise the field is not injurious to the woman so far
as the labour is concerned, and the exposure is not so great as has been
supposed, because women are scarcely ever expected to work in wet
weather. The worst of the exposure is probably endured upon the arable
fields in the bitter winds of spring; but this does not last very long. In what
way field-labour is degrading to the women it is difficult to understand. The
only work of a disgusting nature now performed by women is the beating of
clots on pasture-land, and that is quickly over. After all, there is nothing so
very dreadful in it. Stone-picking, couch-clearing, hoeing, haymaking,
reaping, certainly none of these are in any way disgusting operations.
Women do not attend to cattle now. As to the immorality, undoubtedly a
great deal of what is coarse and rude does pass upon the hayfield, but the
hayfield does not originate it; if the same men and women met elsewhere,
the same jokes would be uttered and conduct indulged in. The position of
agricultural women is a painful one to contemplate, and their lives full of

hardships; but field-labour cannot be fairly accused as the cause of the evils
they endure. Their strength is overstrained in the cornfield; but what can
you do? It is their gold-mine—their one grand opportunity of getting a little
money. It would be cruel kindness to deny it to them; and, in point of fact,
except by interfering with the liberty of the subject, it would be impossible
to prevent them. Farm-labour is certainly to be preferred to much of the
work that women do in manufacturing districts. At least there is no
overcrowding; there is plenty of fresh air, and the woman who works in the
field looks quite as robust and healthy as her sister sitting all day in a
confined factory.
It used to be common to see women dressed in a kind of smock-frock; this
was in the days when they milked, and it is still occasionally worn. Now
they generally wear linsey dresses in the winter, and cotton in the summer,
at prices from 4½d. to 6d. per yard. They wear boots nailed and tipped
much like the men, but not so heavy, and in rough weather corduroy gaiters.
Their cooking is rude and detestable to any one else's ideas; but it appears
exactly suited to the coarse tastes and hearty appetite of their husbands.
Being uneducated, and a large proportion unable to read, their chief
intellectual amusement consists in tittle-tattle and gossip. They are
generally inclined to be religious after a fashion, and frequent the chapel or
the cottage in which the itinerant preacher holds forth. In summer this
preacher will mount upon a waggon placed in a field by the roadside, and
draw a large audience, chiefly women, who loudly respond and groan and
mutter after the most approved manner. Now and then an elderly woman
may be found who is considered to have a gift of preaching, and holds forth
at great length, quoting Scripture right and left. The exhibitions of emotion
on the part of the women at such meetings and in the services in their
cottages are not pleasant to listen to, but the impression left on the mind is
that they are in earnest.
They are a charitable race, and eager to help each other. They will watch by
the bedsides of their sick neighbours, divide the loaf of bread, look after the
children and trudge weary miles to the town for medicine. On the other
hand, they are almost childlike in imbibing jealousies and hatreds, and
unsparing in abuse and imputation towards a supposed enemy. They are
bolder in speech than their husbands to those who occupy higher places in
the social scale. It cannot be said that agricultural women are handsome. In

childhood they are too often thin and stunted; later they shoot up and grow
taller, but remain thin and bony till from eighteen to twenty, when they get
plumper, and then is their period of prettiness, if at all. Bright eyes, clear
complexions, and glossy hair form their attractions, for their features are
scarcely ever good. The brief beauty of the prime of youth speedily fades,
and at five-and-twenty the agricultural woman, especially if married, is pale
or else burnt by the sun to a brown, with flat chest and rounded shoulders. It
is rare indeed to see a woman with any pretensions to what is called a
figure. It would be wonderful if there were, for much of the labour induces
a stooping position, and they are never taught when young to sit upright.
Growing plainer and plainer as years go by, the elder women are wrinkled
and worn-looking, and have contracted a perpetual stoop. Many live to a
great age. In small parishes it is common to find a large number of women
of seventy and eighty, and there are few cottages which do not contain an
old woman. This is hardly a result in accordance with the labour they have
undergone. The explanation probably is that, continued through a series of
generations, it has produced a strength and stamina which can survive
almost anything. Certain it is that young couples about to marry often
experience much difficulty in finding cottages, because they are occupied
by extremely aged pairs; and landlords, anxious to tear down and remove
old cottages tumbling to pieces, are restrained from doing so out of regard
for the aged tenants, who cling with a species of superstitious tenderness to
the crumbling walls and decayed thatch. At this age, at seventy-five or even
eighty, the agricultural woman retains a strength of body astonishing to a
town-bred woman. She will walk eight or ten miles, without apparent
fatigue, to and from the nearest town for her provisions. She will almost to
the last carry her prong out into the hayfield, and do a little work in some
corner, and bear her part in the gleaning after the harvest. She lives almost
entirely upon weak tea and bread sops. Her mental powers continue nearly
unimpaired, and her eyes are still good, though her teeth have long gone.
She will laugh over memories of practical jokes played at harvest-homes
half-a-century ago; and slowly spells over the service in a prayer-book
which asks blessings upon a king instead of a queen. She often keeps the
village "confectioner's" shop—i.e., a few bottles of sweets and jumbles in
the window, side by side with "twists" of whipcord for the ploughboys and
carters, and perhaps has a license for tobacco and snuff.

But long before this age they have in most cases been kept by the parish.
The farmers who form the guardians know well the history of the poor of
their parishes, and remembering the long years of hard work, always allow
as liberal a relief as they can to these women. Out of all their many children
and grandchildren, it may happen that one has got on fairly well in life, has
a business as a blacksmith, or tinker, or carpenter, and gives her a shilling or
so a week; and a shilling goes a long way with a woman who lives upon tea
and sops. In their latter days these women resemble the pollard oaks, which
linger on year after year, and finally fall from sheer decay.

AN ENGLISH HOMESTEAD.
It is easy to pass along a country road without observing half of the
farmhouses, so many being situated at a distance from the highway, and
others hidden by the thick hedges and the foliage of the trees. This is
especially the case in districts chiefly occupied in pasture farming, meadow
land being usually found along the banks of rivers, on broad level plains, or
in slightly undulating prairie-like country. A splendid belt of meadows often
runs at the base of the chalk hills, where the springs break out; and it is here
that some of the most beautiful pastoral scenery is to be found.
By the side of the highway there are gates at intervals in the close-cropped
hedge—kept close-cropped by the strict orders of the road surveyors—
giving access to the green fields through which runs a waggon-track,
apparently losing itself in the grass. This track will take the explorer to a
farmhouse. It is not altogether pleasant to drive over in a spring trap, as the
wheels jolt in the hard ruts, and the springs are shaken in the deep furrows,
the vehicle going up and down like a boat upon the waves. Why there
should be such furrows in a meadow is a question that naturally arises in the
mind. Whether it be mown with the scythe or the mowing-machine, it is of
advantage to have the surface of the field as nearly as possible level; and it
is therefore most probable that these deep furrows had their origin at a
period when a different state of things prevailed, when the farmer strove to
grow as much wheat as possible, and devoted every acre that he dared break
up to the plough. Many of these fields were ill adapted for the growth of
corn, the soil unsuitable and liable to be partially flooded; consequently as
soon as the market was opened, and the price of wheat declined, so that
rapid fortunes could no longer be made by it, the fields were allowed to
return to their natural condition. No trouble was taken to relevel the land,
and the furrows remain silent witnesses to the past. They are useful as
drains it is true; but, being so broad, the water only passes off slowly and
encourages the rough grass and "bull-polls" to spring up, which are as
uneatable by cattle as the Australian spinifex.

The waggon-track is not altogether creditable to the farmer, who would, one
would have thought, have had a good road up to his house at all events. It is
very wide, and in damp weather every one who drives along it goes further
and further out into the grass to find a firm spot, till as much space is
rendered barren as by one of the great hedges, now so abominated. The
expense of laying down stone is considerable in some localities where the
geological formation does not afford quarries; yet even then there is a plan,
simple in itself, but rarely resorted to, by which a great saving in outlay
may be effected. Any one who will look at a cart-track will see that there
are three parallel marks left by the passage of the cart upon the ground. The
two outside ruts are caused by the wheels, and between these is a third
beaten in by the hoofs of the horse. The plan consists in placing stone,
broken up small, not across the whole width of the track, but in these three
ruts only; for it is in these ruts alone that the wear takes place, and, if the
ground were firm there, no necessity would exist to go farther into the field.
To be thoroughly successful, a trench, say six or eight inches wide, and
about as deep, should be cut in the place of each rut, and these trenches
macadamised. Grass grows freely in the narrow green strips between the
ruts, and the track has something of the appearance of a railroad. It is
astonishing how long these metals, as it were, will last, when once well put
down; and the track has a neat, effective look. The foot-passenger is as
much benefited as the tenant of the field. In wet weather he walks upon the
macadamised strip dryshod, and in summer upon either of the grass strips,
easily and comfortably, without going out into the mowing-grass to have
the pleasure of turf under his feet.
These deep furrows are also awkward to cross with heavy loads of hay or
straw, and it requires much skill to build a load able to withstand the severe
jolting and lurching. Some of the worst are often filled up with a couple of
large faggots in the harvest season. These tracks run by the side of the
hedge, and the ditches are crossed by bridges or "drocks." The last gate
opens into a small field surrounded with a high thick hawthorn hedge, itself
a thing of beauty in May and June, first with the May blossom and
afterwards with the delicate-tinted dog or wild roses. A spreading ash-tree
stands on either side of the gateway, from which on King Charles's day the
ploughboys carefully select small branches, those with the leaves evenly
arranged, instead of odd numbers, to place in their hats. Tall elm-trees grow

close together in the hedge and upon the "shore" of the ditch, enclosing the
place in a high wall of foliage. In the branches are the rooks' nests, built of
small twigs apparently thrown together, and yet so firmly intertwined as to
stand the swaying of the tree-tops in the rough blasts of winter. In the spring
the rook builds a second nest on the floor of the old one, and this continues
till five or six successive layers may be traced; and when at last some ruder
tempest strews the grass with its ruin, there is enough wood to fill a bushel
basket.
The dovecot is fixed in the fork of one of the larger elms, where the trunk
divides into huge boughs, each the size of a tree; and in the long rank grass
near the hedge the backs of a black Berkshire pig or two may be seen like
porpoises rolling in the green sea. Here and there an ancient apple-tree, bent
down and bowed to the ground with age, offers a mossy, shady seat upon
one of its branches which has returned to the earth from which it sprung.
Some wooden posts grown green and lichen-covered, standing at regular
intervals, show where the housewife dries her linen. Right before the very
door a great horse-chestnut tree rears itself in all the beauty of its thousands
of blossoms, hiding half the house. A small patch of ground in front is railed
in with wooden palings to keep out the pigs, and poultry, and dogs—for
almost every visitor brings with him one or more dogs—and in this narrow
garden grow velvety wall-flowers, cloves, pinks, shrubs of lavender, and a
few herbs which are useful for seasoning. The house is built of brick; but
the colour is toned down by age, and against the wall a pear-tree is trained
upon one side, and upon the other a cherry-tree, so that at certain seasons
one may rise in the morning and gather the fresh fruits from the window.
The lower windows were once latticed; but the old frames have been
replaced with the sash, which if not so picturesque, affords more light, and
most old farmhouses are deficient in the supply of light. The upper
windows remain latticed still. The red tiles of the roof are dull with lichen
and the beating of the weather; and the chimney, if looked at closely, is full
of tiny holes—it is where the leaden pellets from guns fired at the
mischievous starlings have struck the bricks. A pair of doves perched upon
the roof-tree coo amorously to each other, and a thin streak of blue smoke
rises into the still air.
The door is ajar, or wide open. There is no fear here of thieves, or street-
boys throwing stones into the hall. Excepting in rain or rough wind, and at

night, that front door will be open almost all the summer long. When shut at
night it is fastened with a wooden bar passing across the whole width of the
door, and fitting into iron staples on each post—a simple contrivance, but
very strong and not easily tampered with. Many of the interior doors still
open with the old thumb-latch; but the piece of shoe-string to pull and lift it
is now relegated to the cottages, and fast disappearing even there before
brass-handled locks. This house is not old enough to possess the nail-
studded door of solid oak and broad stone-built porch of some farmhouses
still occasionally to be found, and which date from the sixteenth century.
The porch here simply projects about two feet, and is supported by trellis-
work, up which the honeysuckle has been trained. A path of stone slabs
leads from the palings up to the threshold, and the hall within is paved with
similar flags. The staircase is opposite the doorway, narrow, and guiltless of
oilcloth or carpeting; and with reason, for the tips and nails of the heavy
boots which tramp up and down it would speedily wear carpets into rags.
There is a door at the bottom of the staircase closed at night. By the side of
the staircase is a doorway which leads into the dairy—two steps lower than
the front of the house.
The sitting-room is on the left of the hall, and the floor is of the same cold
stone flags, which in damp weather become wet and slimy. These flags, in
fact, act as a barometer, and foretell rain with great accuracy, as it were
perspiring with latent moisture at its approach. The chimney was originally
constructed for a wood fire upon the hearth, and of enormous size, so that
several sides of bacon could be hung up inside to be smoke-dried. The
fireplace was very broad, so that huge logs could be thrown at once upon
the fire with very little trouble of sawing them short. Since coal has come
into general use, and wood grown scarce, the fireplace has been partly built
up and an iron grate inserted, which looks out of place in so large a cavity.
The curious fire-dogs, upon which the wood was thrown, may still, perhaps,
be found upstairs in some corner of the lumber-room. On the mantelpiece
are still preserved, well polished and bright, the several pieces of the "jack"
or cooking apparatus; and a pair of great brazen candlesticks ornament it at
each end. A leaden or latten tobacco-bowl, a brazen pestle and mortar, and
half-a-dozen odd figures in china, are also scattered upon it, surmounted by
a narrow looking-glass. In one corner stands an old eight-day clock with a
single hour hand—minute hands being a modern improvement; but it is

silent, and its duties are performed by an American timepiece supported
upon a bracket against the wall. Upstairs, however, upon the landing, a
similar ancient piece of clockmaking still ticks solemn and slow with a
ponderous melancholy. The centre of the room is occupied with an oaken
table, solid and enduring, but inconvenient to sit at; and upon each side of
the fireplace is a stiff-backed arm-chair. A ledge under the window forms a
pleasant seat in summer. Before the fireplace is a rug, the favourite resort of
the spaniels and cats. The rest of the floor used to be bare; but of late years
a square of cocoanut matting has been laid down. A cumbrous piece of
furniture takes up almost half of one side—not known in modern
manufactories. It is of oak, rudely polished, and inlaid with brass. At the
bottom are great deep drawers, pulled open with brass rings ornamented
with dogs' heads. In these drawers are kept cow-drenches—bottles of oils
for the wounds which cattle sometimes get from nails or kicks; dog-whips
and pruning-knives; a shot-belt and powder-flask; an old horse-pistol; a
dozen odd stones or fossils picked up upon the farm and kept as curiosities;
twenty or thirty old almanacs, and a file of the county paper for forty years;
and a hundred similar odds and ends. Above the drawers comes a desk with
a few pigeon-holes; a desk little used, for the farmer is less of a literary turn
than almost any other class. The pigeon-holes are stuffed full of old papers,
recipes for cattle medicines, and, perhaps, a book of divinity or sermons
printed in the days of Charles II., leather-covered and worm-eaten. Still
higher are a pair of cupboards where china, the tea-set, and the sugar and
groceries in immediate use are kept. On the top, which is three or four
inches under the ceiling, are two or three small brown-paper parcels of
grass seeds, and a variety of nondescript articles. Opposite, on the other
wall, and close above the chimneypiece, so as to be kept dry, is the gun-rack
with two double-barrels, a long single-barrel duck gun, and a cavalry sabre,
worn once a year by a son of the house who goes out to training in the
yeomanry.
There are a few pictures, not of a high class—three or four prints depicting
Dick Turpin's ride to York, and a coloured sketch of some steeplechase
winner, or a copy of a well-known engraving representing a feat
accomplished many years ago at a farm. A flock of sheep were shorn, the
wool carded and spun, and a coat made of it, and worn by the flockowner,

and all in one day. From this room a door opens into the cellar and pantry,
partly underground, and reached by three or four steps.
On the other side of the hall is the parlour, which was originally floored,
like the sitting-room, with stone flags, since taken up and replaced by
boards. This is carpeted, and contains a comfortable old-fashioned sofa,
horse-hair chairs, and upon the side tables may, perhaps, be found a few
specimens of valuable old china, made to do duty as flower-vases, and filled
with roses. The room has a fresh, sweet smell from the open window and
the flowers. It tempts almost irresistibly to repose in the noontide heat of a
summer's day.
Upstairs there are two fair-sized bedrooms, furnished with four-post
wooden bedsteads. The second flight of stairs, going up to the attic, has also
a door at the foot. This house is built upon a simple but effective design,
well calculated for the purposes to be served. It resembles two houses
placed not end to end, as in a block, but side by side, and each part has a
separate roof. Under the front roof, which is somewhat higher than the
other, are the living-rooms of the family: sitting-room, parlour, bedroom,
and attics, or servants' bedrooms. Under the lower roof are the offices, the
cheese-loft, dairy, kitchen, cellar, and wood-house. Numerous doors give
easy communication on each floor, so that the house consists of two distinct
portions, and the business is kept quite apart from the living rooms, and yet
close to them. This is, perhaps, the most convenient manner in which a
dairy farmhouse can be built; and the plan was undoubtedly the result of
experience. Of course, in dairy-farming upon a very extended scale, or as a
gentlemanly amusement, it would be preferable to have the offices entirely
apart, and at some distance from the dwelling-house. These remarks apply
to an ordinary farm of moderate size.
Leaving the hall by the door at the side of the staircase, two steps descend
into the dairy, which is almost invariably floored with stone flags, even in
localities where brick is used for the flooring of the sitting-room. The great
object aimed at in the construction of the dairy was coolness, and freedom
from dust as much as possible. The stone flags ensure a cool floor; and the
windows always open to the north, so that neither the summer sunshine nor
the warm southern winds can injuriously affect the produce. It is a long
open room, whitewashed, in the centre of which stands the cheese-tub, until

lately invariably made of wood, but now frequently of tin, this material
taking much less trouble to keep clean. The cheese-tub is large enough for a
Roman lady's bath of milk. Against one wall are the whey-leads—shallow,
long, and broad vessels of wood, lined with lead, supported two or three
feet above the floor, so that buckets can be placed underneath. In these
"leads" the whey is kept, and drawn off by pulling up a wooden plug. Under
the "leads"—as out of the way—are some of the great milk-pans into which
the milk is poured. Pussy sometimes dips her nose into these, and whitens
her whiskers with cream. At one end of the room is the cheese-press. The
ancient press, with its complicated arrangement of long iron levers
weighted at the end something like a steelyard, and drawn up by cords and
pulleys, has been taken down and lies discarded in the lumber-room. The
pressure in the more modern machine is obtained from a screw. The rennet-
vat is perhaps hidden behind the press, and there are piles of the cheese-
moulds or vats beside it, into which the curd is placed when fit to be
compressed into the proper shape and consistency. All the utensils here are
polished, and clean to the last degree; without extreme cleanliness success
in cheese or butter making cannot be achieved. The windows are devoid of
glass; they are really wind doors, closed when necessary, with a shutter on
hinges like a cupboard door. Cats and birds are prevented from entering by
means of wire screens—like a coarse netting of wire—and an upright iron
bar keeps out more dangerous thieves. There is a copper for scalding milk.
When in good order there is scarcely any odour in a dairy, notwithstanding
the decidedly strong smell of some of the materials employed: free egress
of air and perfect cleanliness takes off all but the faintest astringent flavour.
In summer it is often the custom of dairymaids to leave buckets full of
water standing under the "leads" or elsewhere out of the way, or a milk-pan
is left with water in it, to purify the atmosphere. Water, it is well known, has
a remarkable power of preventing the air from going "dead" as it were. A
model dairy should have a small fountain in some convenient position, with
a jet constantly playing. The state of the atmosphere has the most powerful
effect upon the contents of the dairy, especially during times of electrical
tension.
To the right of the dairy is the brewhouse, now rarely used for the purpose
implied in its name, though the tubs, and coolers, and other "plant"
necessary for the process are still preserved. Here there is a large copper

also; and the oven often opens on to the brewhouse. In this place the men
have their meals. Next to it is the wood-house, used for the storage of the
wood which is required for immediate use, and must therefore be dry; and
beyond that the kitchen, where the fire is still upon the hearth, though coal
is mixed with the logs and faggots. Along the whole length of this side of
the house there is a paved or pitched courtyard enclosed by a low brick
wall, with one or two gates opening upon the paths which lead to the
rickyards and the stalls. The buttermilk and refuse from the dairy runs by a
channel cut in the stone across the court into a vault or well sunk in the
ground, from whence it is dipped for the pigs. The vault is closed at the
mouth by a heavy wooden lid. There is a well and pump for water here;
sometimes with a windlass, when the well is deep. If the water be low or
out of condition, it is fetched in yokes from the nearest running stream. The
acid or "eating" power of the buttermilk, &c., may be noted in the stones,
which in many places are scooped or hollowed out. A portion of the court is
roofed in, and is called the "skilling." It is merely covered in without walls,
the roof supported upon oaken posts. Under this the buckets are placed to
dry after being cleaned, and here the churn may often be seen. A separate
staircase, rising from the dairy, gives access to the cheese-loft. It is an
immense apartment, reaching from one end of the house to the other, and as
lofty as the roof will permit, for it is not ceiled. The windows are like those
of the dairy. Down the centre are long double shelves sustained upon strong
upright beams, tier upon tier from the floor as high as the arms can
conveniently reach. Upon these shelves the cheese is stored, each lying
upon its side; and, as no two cheeses are placed one upon the other until
quite ready for eating, a ton or two occupies a considerable space while in
process of drying. They are also placed in rows upon the floor, which is
made exceptionally strong, and supported upon great beams to bear the
weight. The scales used to be hung from a beam overhead, and consisted of
an iron bar, at each end of which a square board was slung with ropes—one
board to pile up the cheese on, and the other for the counterpoise of
weights. These rude and primitive scales are now generally superseded by
modern and more accurate instruments, weighing to a much smaller
fraction. Stone half-hundredweights and stone quarters were in common use
not long since. A cheese-loft, when full, is a noble sight of its kind, and
represents no little labour and skill. When sold, the cheese is carefully
packed in the cart with straw to prevent its being injured. The oil or grease

from the cheese gradually works its way into the shelves and floor, and
even into the staircase, till the woodwork seems saturated with it. Rats and
mice are the pests of the loft; and so great is their passion for cheese that
neither cats, traps, nor poison can wholly repress these invaders, against
whom unceasing war is waged. The starlings—who, if the roof be of thatch,
as it is in many farmhouses, make their nests in it—occasionally carry their
holes right through, and are unmercifully exterminated when they venture
within reach, or they would quickly let the rain and the daylight in.
As the dairy and offices face the north, so the front of the house—the
portion used for domestic purposes—has a southern aspect, which
experience has proved to be healthy. But at the same time, despite its
compactness and general convenience, there are many defects in the
building—defects chiefly of a sanitary character. It is very doubtful if there
are any drains at all. Even though the soil be naturally dry, the ground floor
is almost always cold and damp. The stone flags are themselves cold
enough, and are often placed upon the bare earth. The threshold is on a level
with the ground outside, and sometimes a step lower, and in wet weather
the water penetrates to the hall. There is another disadvantage. If the door
be left open, which it usually is, frogs, toads, and creeping things generally,
sometimes make their way in, though ruthlessly swept out again; and an
occasional snake from the long grass at the very door is an unpleasant,
though perfectly harmless visitor. The floor should be raised a foot or so
above the level of the earth, and some provision made against the damp by
a layer of concrete or something of the kind. If not, even if boards be
substituted for the flags, they will soon decay. It often happens that
farmhouses upon meadow land are situated on low ground, which in winter
is saturated with water which stands in the furrows, and makes the footpaths
leading to the house impassable except to water-tight boots. This must, and
undoubtedly does affect the health of the inmates, and hence probably the
prevalence of rheumatism. The site upon which the house stands should be
so drained as to carry off the water. Some soils contract to an appreciable
extent in a continuance of drought, and expand in an equal degree with wet
—a fact apparent to any one who walks across a field where the soil is clay,
in a dry time, when the deep, wide cracks cannot be overlooked. Alternate
swelling and contraction of the earth under the foundations of a house
produce a partial dislocation of the brickwork, and hence it is common

enough to see cracks running up the walls. Had the site been properly
drained, and the earth consequently always dry, this would not have
happened; and it is a matter of consideration for the landlord, who in time
may find it necessary to shore up a wall with a buttress. The great
difference in the temperature of a drained soil and an undrained one has
often been observed, amounting sometimes to as much as twenty degrees—
a serious matter where health is concerned. A foolish custom was observed
in the building of many old farmhouses, i.e., of carrying beams of wood
across the chimney—a practice that has led to disastrous fires. The soot
accumulates. These huge cavernous chimneys are rarely swept, and at last
catch alight and smoulder for many days: presently fire breaks out in the
middle of a room under which the beam passes.
Houses erected in blocks or in towns do not encounter the full force of the
storms of winter to the same degree as a solitary farmhouse, standing a
quarter or half-a-mile from any other dwelling. This is the reason why the
old farmers planted elm-trees and encouraged the growth of thick hawthorn
hedges close to the homestead. The north-east and the south-west are the
quarters from whence most is to be dreaded: the north-east for the bitter
wind which sweeps along and grows colder from the damp, wet meadows it
passes over; and the south-west for the driving rain, lasting sometimes for
days and weeks together. Trees and hedges break the force of the gales, and
in summer shelter from the glaring sun.
The architectural arrangement of the farmhouse just described gives almost
perfect privacy. Except visitors, no one comes to the front door or passes
unpleasantly close to the windows. Labourers and others all go to the
courtyard at the back. The other plans upon which farmsteads are built are
far from affording similar privacy. There are some which, in fact, are
nothing but an enlarged and somewhat elongated cottage, with the
dwelling-rooms at one end and the dairy and offices at the other, and the
bedrooms over both. Everybody and everything brought to or taken from
the place has to pass before the dwelling-room windows—a most
unpleasant arrangement. Another style is square, with low stone walls
whitewashed, and thatched roof of immense height. Against it is a lean-to,
the eaves of the roof of which are hardly three feet from the ground. So
high-pitched a roof necessitates the employment of a great amount of
woodwork, and the upper rooms have sloping ceilings. They may look

picturesque from a distance, but are inconvenient and uncouth within, and
admirably calculated for burning. A somewhat superior description is built
in the shape of a carpenter's "square." The dwelling-rooms form, as it were,
one house, and the offices, dairy and cheese-loft are added on at one end at
right angles. The courtyard is in the triangular space between. For some
things this is a convenient arrangement; but there still remains the
disagreeableness of the noise, and, at times, strong odours from the
courtyard under the windows of the dwelling-house. Nearly all farmsteads
have awkwardly low ceilings, which in a town would cause a close
atmosphere, but are not so injurious in the open country, with doors
constantly ajar. In erecting a modern house this defect would, of course, be
avoided. The great thickness of the walls is sometimes a deception; for in
pulling down old buildings it is occasionally found that the interior of the
wall is nothing but loose broken stones and bricks enclosed or rammed in
between two walls. The staircases are generally one of the worst features of
the old houses, being between a wall and a partition—narrow, dark, steep,
and awkwardly placed, and without windows or handrails. These houses
were obviously built for a people living much out of doors.

JOHN SMITH'S SHANTY.
He was standing in the ditch leaning heavily upon the long handle of his
axe. It was a straight stick of ash, roughly shaved down to some sort of
semblance of smoothness, such as would have worked up an unpractised
hand into a mass of blisters in ten minutes' usage, but which glided easily
through those horny palms, leaving no mark of friction. The continuous
outdoor labour, the beating of innumerable storms, and the hard, coarse
fare, had dried up all the original moisture of the hand, till it was rough,
firm, and cracked or chapped like a piece of wood exposed to the sun and
weather. The natural oil of the skin, which gives to the hand its beautiful
suppleness and delicate sense of touch, was gone like the sap in the tree he
was felling, for it was early in the winter. However the brow might perspire,
there was no dampness on the hand, and the helve of the axe was scarcely
harder and drier. In order, therefore, that the grasp might be firm, it was
necessary to artificially wet the palms, and hence that custom which so
often disgusts lookers-on, of spitting on the hands before commencing
work. This apparently gratuitous piece of dirtiness is in reality absolutely
necessary. Men with hands in this state have hardly any feeling in them;
they find it difficult to pick up anything small, as a pin—the fingers fumble
over it; and as for a pen, they hold it like a hammer. His chest was open to
the north wind, which whistled through the bare branches of the tall elm
overhead as if they were the cordage of a ship, and came in sudden blasts
through the gaps in the hedge, blowing his shirt back, and exposing the
immense breadth of bone, and rough dark skin tanned to a brown-red by the
summer sun while mowing. The neck rose from it short and thick like that
of a bull, and the head was round, and covered with a crop of short grizzled
hair not yet quite grey, but fast losing its original chestnut colour. The
features were fairly regular, but coarse, and the nose flattened. An almost
worn-out old hat thrown back on the head showed a low, broad, wrinkled
forehead. The eyes were small and bleared, set deep under shaggy
eyebrows. The corduroy trousers, yellow with clay and sand, were
shortened below the knee by leather straps like garters, so as to exhibit the
whole of the clumsy boots, with soles like planks, and shod with iron at

heel and tip. These boots weigh seven pounds the pair; and in wet weather,
with clay and dirt clinging to them, must reach nearly double that.
In spite of all the magnificent muscular development which this man
possessed, there was nothing of the Hercules about him. The grace of
strength was wanting, the curved lines were lacking; all was gaunt, angular,
and square. The chest was broad enough, but flat, a framework of bones
hidden by a rough hairy skin; the breasts did not swell up like the rounded
prominences of the antique statue. The neck, strong enough as it was to bear
the weight of a sack of corn with ease, was too short, and too much a part,
as it were, of the shoulders. It did not rise up like a tower, distinct in itself;
and the muscles on it, as they moved, produced hollow cavities distressing
to the eye. It was strength without beauty; a mechanical kind of power, like
that of an engine, working through straight lines and sharp angles. There
was too much of the machine, and too little of the animal; the lithe, easy
motion of the lion or the tiger was not there. The impression conveyed was,
that such strength had been gained through a course of incessant exertion of
the rudest kind, unassisted by generous food and checked by unnatural
exposure.
John Smith heaved up his axe and struck at the great bulging roots of the
elm, from which he had cleared away the earth with his spade. A heavy chip
flew out with a dull thud on the sward. The straight handle of the axe
increased the labour of the work, for in this curiously conservative country
the American improvement of the double curved handle has not yet been
adopted. Chip after chip fell in the ditch, or went spinning out into the field.
The axe rose and fell with a slow, monotonous motion. Though there was
immense strength in every blow, there was no vigour in it. Suddenly, while
it was swinging in the air overhead, there came the faint, low echo of a
distant railway whistle, and the axe was dropped at once, without even
completing the blow. "That's the express," he muttered, and began cleaning
the dirt from his shoes. The daily whistle of the express was the signal for
luncheon. Hastily throwing on a slop hung on the bushes, and over that a
coat, he picked up a small bag, and walked slowly off down the side of the
hedge to where the highway road went by. Here he sat down, somewhat
sheltered by a hawthorn bush, in the ditch, facing the road, and drew out his
bread and cheese.

About a quarter of a loaf of bread, or nearly, and one slice of cheese was
this full-grown and powerful man's dinner that cold, raw winter's day. His
drink was a pint of cold weak tea, kept in a tin can, for these men are
moderate enough with liquor at their meals, whatever they may be at other
times. He held the bread in his left hand and the cheese was placed on it,
and kept in its place by the thumb, the grimy dirt on which was shielded by
a small piece of bread beneath it from the precious cheese. His plate and
dish was his broad palm, his only implement a great jack-knife with a buck-
horn handle. He ate slowly, thoughtfully, deliberately; weighing each
mouthful, chewing the cud as it were. All the man's motions were heavy and
slow, deadened as if clogged with a great load. There was no "life" in him.
What little animation there was left had taken him to eat his dinner by the
roadside—the instinct of sociality—that if possible he might exchange a
word with some one passing. In factories men work in gangs, and hundreds
are often within call of each other; a rough joke or an occasional question
can be put and answered; there is a certain amount of sympathy, a sensation
of company and companionship. But alone in the fields, the human instinct
of friendship is checked, the man is driven back upon himself and his own
narrow range of thought, till the mind and heart grow dull, and there only
remains such a vague ill-defined want as carried John Smith to the roadside
that day.
He had finished his cheese and lit a short clay pipe, and thrust his hands
deep in his pockets, when there was a rustling noise in the hedge a little
farther down, and a short man jumped out into the road—even jumping
with his hands in his pockets. He saw Smith directly and came towards him,
and sat himself on a heap of flints used for mending the road.
"What's thee at to-day?" asked John, after a pause.
"Ditching," said the other laconically, pushing out one foot by way of
illustrating the fact. It was covered with black mud far above the ankle, and
there were splashes of mud up to his waist—his hands, as he proceeded to
light his pipe, were black, too, from the same cause.
"Thee's bin in main deep," said John, after a slow survey of the other's
appearance.

The fellow stamped his boot on the ground, and the slime and slush oozed
out of it and formed a puddle. "That's pretty stuff to stand in for a man of
sixty-four, yent it, John?" With a volubility and energy of speech little to be
expected from his wizened appearance, the hedger and ditcher entered into
details of his job. He began work at six that morning with stiff legs and
swollen feet, and as he stood in the mingled mire and water, the rheumatism
came gradually on, rising higher up his limbs from the ankles, and growing
sharper with every twinge, while the cold and bitter wind cut through his
thin slop on his chest, which was not so strong as it used to be. His arms got
stiff with the labour of lifting up shovelful after shovelful of heavy mud to
plaster the side of the ditch, his feet turned cold as "flints," and the sickly
smell of the slime upset his stomach so that when he tried to eat his bread
and cheese he could not. Through this speech John smoked steadily on, till
the other stopped and looked at him for sympathy.
"Well, Jim, anyhow," said Smith, "thee hasn't got far to walk to the job;"
and he pointed with the stem of his pipe to the low roof of a cottage just
visible a few hundred yards distant.
"Ay, and a place it be to live in, that," said Jim. There were only two rooms,
he explained, and both downstairs—no upstairs at all—and the first of these
was so small he could reach across it, and the thatch had got so thin in one
place that the rain came through. The floor was only hard mud, and the
garden not big enough to grow a sack of potatoes, while one wall of the
house, which was only "wattle and daub" (i.e., lath and plaster), rose up
from the very edge of a great stagnant pond. Overhead there was an elm,
from the branches of which in wet weather there was a perpetual drip, drip
on the thatch, till the moss and grass grew on the roof in profusion. All the
sewage and drainage from the cottage ran into the pond, over which at night
there was almost always a thick damp mist, which crept in through the
crevices of the rotten walls, and froze the blood in the sleepers' veins.
Sometimes a flood came down, and the pond rose and washed away the
cabbages from the garden, leaving a deposit of gritty sand which killed all
vegetation, and they could only keep the water from coming indoors by
making a small dam of clay across the doorway. There was only a low
hedge of elder between the cottage and a dirty lane; and in the night,
especially if there happened to be a light burning, it was common enough
for a stone to come through the window, flung by some half-drunken

ploughboy. A pretty place for a human being to live in: and again he looked
up into Smith's face for comment.
"Thee built 'un thee-self, didn't 'ee?" said John, in his slow way.
"Ay, that I did," continued Jim, not seeing the drift of the remark. He not
only built it, but he brought up nineteen children in it, and fourteen of them
lived to grow up, all the offspring of one wife. And a time she had of it, too.
None of them ever fell in that pond, though he often wished they would;
and they were all pretty healthy, which was a bad thing, because it made
them hungry, and if they had been ill the parish would have kept them. All
that he had done on 12s. a week, and he minded the time when it was only
9s., ay, and even when it was 6s., and 'twas better then than it was now with
15s. That was before the Unions came about, in the time of the old
workhouses in every parish. Then the farmers used to find everybody a job.
Every morning they had to go round from one farmer to the other, and if
there was no work then they went to the workhouse, or sometimes to the
vestry-room in the church, where every man had a loaf of bread for every
head there was in his family, so that the more children he had the more
loaves of bread, which was a capital thing when the children were small. He
had known a man in those times sent seven miles with a wheelbarrow to
fetch a barrow load of coal from the canal wharf, and then have to wheel it
back seven miles, and get one shilling for his day's work. Still they were
better times than these, because the farmers for their own sake were forced
to find the fellows something to do; but now they did not care, and it was a
hard thing to find work, especially when a man grew old, and stiff about the
joints. Now the Boards of Guardians would not give any relief unless the
applicants were ill, or not able-bodied, and even then they were often
required to break stones, and he was very much inclined to throw his spade
in that old pond and go to the Union with the "missis" and all the lot for
good. He had the rheumatism bad enough. It would serve them right. He
had worked "nigh handy" sixty years; and all he had got by it he could put
in his eye. They ought to keep him now. It was not half so good as the old
times for all the talk; then the children could bring home a bit of wood out
of the hedges to boil the pot with, but now they must not touch a stick, or
there was the law on them in a minute. And then coal at the price it was.
Why didn't his sons keep him? Where were they? One was a soldier, and
another had gone to America, and the third was married and had a hard job

to keep himself, and the fourth was gone nobody knew where. As for the
wenches, they were no good in that way. So he and his "missis" muddled on
at home with three of the youngest. And they could not let them alone even
in that. He did go into the Union workhouse for a bit, a while ago, when the
rheumatism was extraordinary bad, but some of the guardians smelt out that
he had a cottage of his own, and it was against the law to relieve anybody
that had property; so he must pay back the relief as a loan or sell the
cottage. He was offered £25 for the place and garden, and he meant to have
taken it, but when they came to look into the writings it was not clear that
he could sell it. It was quit-rent land, and although the landlord had not
taken the rent for twenty years, yet he had entered it in his book as paid (out
of good nature), and the lawyers said it could not be done. But as they
would not let him sell it, he would not turn out, not he. There he would stop
—just to spite them. He knew that nook of his was wanted for cattle stalls
on the new principle, and very handy it would be with all that water close at
hand, but he had worked for sixty years, and had had nineteen children
there, and he would not turn out. Not he. The parson's "missis" and the
squire's "missis" came the other day about that youngest boy of his. They
wanted to get him into some school up in London somewhere, but he
remembered how the squire had served him just for picking up a dead rabbit
that laid in his path one hard snow time. Six weeks in gaol because he could
not pay the fine. And the parson turned him out of his allotment because he
saw him stagger a little in the road one night with the rheumatism. It was a
lie that he was drunk. And suppose he was? The parson had his wine, he
reckoned. They should not have his boy. He rather hoped he would grow up
a bad one, and bother them well. He minded when that sharp old Miss ——
was always coming round with tracts and blankets, like taking some straw
to a lot of pigs, and lecturing his "missis" about economy. What a fuss she
made, and scolded his wife as if she was a thief for having that fifteenth
boy! His "missis" turned on her at last, and said, "Lor, miss, that's all the
pleasure me an' my old man got." As for this talk about the labourers'
Unions, it was all very well for the young men; but it made it worse still for
the old ones. The farmers, if they had to give such a price, would have
young men in full strength: there was no chance at all for an old fellow of
sixty-four with rheumatism. Some of them, too, were terribly offended—
some of the old sort—and turned off the few pensioners they had kept on at

odd jobs for years. However, he supposed he must get back to that ditch
again.
This long oration was delivered not without a certain degree of power and
effect, showing that the man, whatever his faults, might with training have
become rather a clever fellow. The very way in which he contradicted
himself, and announced his intention of never doing that which a moment
before he was determined on, was not without an amount of oratorical art,
since the turn in his view of the subject was led up to by a variety of reasons
which were supposed to convince himself and his hearer at the same time.
His remarks were all the more effective because there was an evident
substratum of stern truth beneath them. But they failed to make much
impression on Smith, who saw his companion depart without a word.
The fact was, that Smith was too well acquainted with the private life of the
orator. In his dull, dim way, he half recognised that the unfortunate old
fellow's evils had been in great part of his own creating. He knew that he
was far from faultless. That poaching business—a very venial offence in a
labourer's eyes—he knew had been a serious one, a matter of some two-
score pheasants and a desperate fight with a gang. Looking at it as property,
the squire had been merciful, pleading with the magistrates for a mitigated
penalty. The drunkenness was habitual. In short, they were a bad lot—there
was a name attached to the whole family for thieving, poaching, drinking,
and even worse. Yet still there were two points that did sink deep into
Smith's mind, and made him pause several times that afternoon in his work.
The first was that long family of nineteen mouths, with the father and
mother making twenty-one. What a number of sins, in the rude logic of the
struggle for existence, that terrible fact glossed over! Who could blame—
what labourer at least could blame—the ragged, ill-clothed children for
taking the dead wood from the hedges to warm their naked limbs? What
labourer could blame the father for taking the hares and rabbits running
across his very path to fill that wretched hovel with savoury steam from the
pot? And further, what labourer could blame the miserable old man for
drowning his feelings, and his sensation of cold and hunger, in liquor?
The great evil of these things is that a fellow-feeling will arise with the
wrong-doer, till the original distinction between right and wrong is lost
sight of entirely. John Smith had a family too. The other point was the sixty

years of labour and their fruit. After two generations of hardest toil and
rudest exposure, still dependent upon the seasons even to permit him to
work, when that work could be obtained. No rest, no cosy fireside nook:
still the bitter wind, and the half-frozen slime and slush rising above the
ankle. In an undefined way Smith had been proud of his broad, enormous
strength, and rocklike hardihood. He had felt a certain rude pleasure in
opening his broad chest to the winter wind. But now he involuntarily closed
his shirt and buttoned it. He did not feel so confident in his own power of
meeting all the contingencies of the future.
Thought without method and without logical sequence is apt to press
heavily upon the uneducated mind. It was thus that these reflections left a
sensation of weight and discomfort upon Smith, and it was in a worse
humour than was common to his usually well-balanced organisation that he
hid away his tools under the bushes as the evening grew too dark for work,
and slowly paced homewards. He had some two miles to walk, and he had
long since begun to feel hungry. Plodding along in a heavy, uneven gait,
there overtook him a tall, raw young lad of eighteen or twenty, slouching
forward with vast strides and whistling merrily. The lad slackened his steps
and joined company!
"Where bist thee working now, then?" asked Smith.
He replied, evidently in high spirits, that he had that day got a job at the
new railway that was making. The wages were 18s. a week—3s. a day—
and he had heard that as soon as the men grew to understand their work and
to be a little skilful, they could get 24s. easily, up by London. The only
drawback was the long walk to the work. Lodgings close at hand were very
dear, as also was food, so dear as to lower the actual receipts to an equality,
if not below that of the agricultural labourer. Four miles every morning and
every night was the price he paid for 18s. a week.
Smith began in his slow, dull way to reckon up his wages aloud against this.
First he had 13s. a week for his daily work. Then he had 1s. extra for
milking on Sundays, and two good meals with beer on that day. Every
week-day he had a pint of beer on finishing work. The young navvy had to
find his own liquor. His cottage, it was true, was his own (that is, he only
paid a low quit-rent of 1s. a year for it), so that that could not be reckoned

in as part of his earnings, as it could with many other men. But the navvy's
wages were the same all the year round, while his in summer were often
nearly double. As a stalwart mower he could earn 25s. a week and more, as
a haymaker 18s., and at harvesting perhaps 30s. If the season was good, and
there was a press for hands, he would get more. But, looking forward, there
was no prospect of rising higher in his trade, of getting higher wages for
more skilful work. He could not be more skilful than he was in ordinary
farm work; and as yet the call for clever men to attend to machinery, &c.,
was very limited; nor were such a class of workmen usually drawn from the
resident population where improvements were introduced. The only hope of
higher wages that was held out to him was from the gradual rise of
everything, or the forced rise consequent upon agitation. But, said he, the
navvy must follow his work from place to place, and lodgings are dear in
the towns, and the farmers in country places will not let their cottages
except to their own labourers—how was the navvy even with higher wages
to keep a wife? The aspiring young fellow beside him replied at once
sharply and decisively, that he did not mean to have a wife, leastways not
till he had got his regular 30s. a week, which he might in time. Then John
Smith made a noise in his chest like a grunt.
They parted after this. Smith went into the farmhouse, and got his pint of
beer, drinking it in one long slow draught, and then made his way through
the scattered village to his cottage. There was a frown on his forehead as he
lifted the latch of the long low thatched building which was his home.
The flickering light of the fire on the hearth, throwing great shadows as it
blazed up and fell, dazed his eyes as he stepped in, and he did not notice a
line stretched right across the room on which small articles of clothing were
hanging to dry in a row. A damp worsted stocking flapped against his face,
and his foot stumbled on the uneven flag stones which formed the floor. He
sat down silently upon a three-legged stool—an old milking-stool—and,
putting his hands on his knees, stared into the fire. It was formed of a few
sticks with just one knob of coal balanced on the top of them, evident care
having been taken that not a jot of its precious heat should be lost. A great
black pot with open lid swung over it, from which rose a slight steam and a
bubbling noise; and this huge, gaunt, bareboned, hungry man, looking into
it, saw a large raw swede, just as from the field, with only the greens cut
off, simmering for his supper. That root in its day of life had been fed well

with superphosphate, and flourished exceedingly, till now its globe could
hardly go into the pot. Down the low chimney there came the monotonous
growl of the bitter winter wind, and a few spots of rain fell hissing on the
embers.
"Is this all thee has got?" he asked, turning to a woman who was busied
with some more damp clothes in a basket.
She faced round quickly—a short, narrow, meagre creature, flat-chested and
square-shouldered, whose face was the hue of light-coloured clay, an almost
corpse-like complexion. Her thin lips hissed out, "Ay, if thee takes thee
money to the pothouse thee won't get bacon for supper."
Smith said nothing in reply, but stared again into the fire.
The children's voices, which had lowered the moment there seemed a
coming quarrel between their parents, rose again. There were three of them
—the youngest four, the eldest seven—playing on the stone flags of the
floor, between whose rough edges there were wide crevices of hardened
mud. With a few short sticks and a broken piece of earthenware for toys,
they were happy in their way. Whatever their food might have been, they
showed no traces of hard usage. Their red "puddy" fists were fat, and their
naked legs round and plump enough. Their faces were full and rosy, and
their voices clear and anything but querulous. The eager passions of
childhood come out fierce and unrestrained, and blows were freely
interchanged, without, however, either cries or apparent hatred. Their naked
knees were on the stone-flags, and the wind, creeping in a draught under the
ill-fitting door, blew their ragged clothes about.
"Thee med well look at 'em, John," said the woman, seeing Smith cast a
sideway glance at the children; and rapidly manipulating the clothing, her
thin nervous lips poured forth a torrent of words upon the silent man. They
had had nothing but bread that day, and nothing but bread and lard the day
before, and now the lard was gone, and the baker would not trust any more.
There were no potatoes because the disease had destroyed them, and the
cabbages were sold for that bit of coal; and as for the swede, she took it out
of Mr. ——'s field, and he was a cross-grained man, and who knew but
what they might have the constable on them before morning? Jane W. and
Sarah Y. went to prison for seven days for stealing swedes. All along of that

cursed drink. If she were the squire she'd shut up all the pothouses in the
county. The men went there, and drank the very shirts off their backs, and
the clothes off their children, ay, and the shoes off their feet; and what was
the use of their having more money when it only went into the publican's
pocket? There they sat, and drank the bread out of the babies' mouths. As
for the women, the most of them, poor things, never tasted beer from one
year's end to another. Old Carter handed her a pint that day, and when she
tasted it she did not know what it was. He might smile, but it was true
though: no more did Jane W. and Sally Y.: they did not know what it tasted
like. And yet they had to be out in the fields at work at eight o'clock, and
their washing to do before that, and perhaps a baby in their arms, and the
tea as weak as water, and no sugar. Milk, they could not get milk for money
—he knew that very well; all the milk went to London. A precious lot of
good the higher wages had done them. The farmers would not let them have
a drop of milk or a scrap of victuals, and talked about rising the price of the
allotment grounds. Allotment, did she say? and how did he lose his
allotment?—didn't he drink, drink, drink, till he had to hand over his
allotment to the landlord of the pothouse, and did not they take it away from
both as soon as they heard of it? Served him right. They had not got a
pound of potatoes, and the children did use to lick up the potato-pot liquor
as if they liked it.
Smith asked where Polly was, but that was only a signal for a fresh
outburst. Polly, if he'd a looked after her she would have been all right.
(Smith turned a sharp glance at her in some alarm at this.) Letting a great
girl like that go about at night by herself while he was a drink, drink,
drinking, and there she was now, the bad hussy, gone to the workhouse to
lie in. (Smith winced.) She never disgraced herself like that; and if he had
sent the wench to service, or stopped her going down to that pothouse with
the fellows, this would not have happened. She always told him how it
would end. He was a good-for-nothing, drunken brute of a man, and had
brought her to all this misery; and she began sobbing.
After twelve long hours of toil, including the walk to and fro, exposed to
the bitter cold, with but a slice of cheese to support the strength of that
brawny chest, this welcome to his supper was more than the sturdy, silent
man could bear. With a dull remembrance of the happy sunlit summer,
twenty years ago, when Martha was a plump, laughing girl, of sloe-black

eyes and nut-brown complexion—with a glimpse of that merry courting
time passing across his mind, Smith got up and walked out into the dark
rainy night. "Ay, thee bist agoing to the liquor again," were the last words
he heard as he shut the door.
It was too true. But what labourer, let us ask, with a full conception of the
circumstances, would blame him? Here there was nothing but hard and
scanty fare, no heat, no light, nothing to cheer the heart, nothing to cause it
to forget the toil of the day and the thought of the morrow, no generous
liquor sung by poets to warm the physical man. But only a few yards farther
down the road there was a great house, with its shutters cosily closed,
ablaze with heat and light, echoing with merry laughter and song. There
was an array of good fellows ready to welcome him, to tell him the news, to
listen eagerly to what he could tell them, to ask him to drink, and to drink
from his cup in boon companionship. There was a social circle in which his
heart and intellect could expand, at least for a while, till the strong liquor
mounted up and overcame his brain; and then, even then, there was the
forgetfulness, the deep slumber of intoxication, utterly oblivious of all
things—perhaps the greatest pleasure of all. Smith went there, and who of
his own class would blame him? And if his own class did not, of what use is
it for other and higher classes to preach morality to him? It is a man's own
comrades, his own class, whose opinions he dreads and conforms to. If they
condemned him for going there, he would avoid the public-house. But they
would have called him a fool if he avoided it. In their logic who could say
they were wrong? A man who is happy is a long while getting drunk, he
talks as much as he drinks; but Smith was dull and silent, and drank
steadily. It was not late, but when the house closed he could but just keep
his feet. In the thick darkness and the driving rain he staggered on,
unconscious of the road he was taking, but bearing roughly towards home.
The cold air rather more stupefied him than brought him to himself.
Insensibly he wandered with uncertain steps down a lane which led by a
gentle slope out into the fields, the fall of the ground guiding his footsteps,
and then stumbling over the root of an ash-tree, fell heavily on the wet
grass. His eyes, half-shut before, closed as if by clockwork, and in a
moment he was firm asleep. His hat had fallen from his brow, and the
grizzled hair was blown about by the wind as it came in gusts through the
hedge. His body was a little sheltered by the tree, but his chest was open

and bare half-way down his waistcoat; and the heavy drops fell from the
boughs of the ash on his stalwart neck, gradually saturating his shirt. It may
have been that the cold numbed him and rendered him more insensible than
he otherwise would have been. No star shone out that night; all was
darkness, clouds, and rain till the dawn broke.
Soon after dawn, the young navvy, going to his work by a short cut, found
Smith still asleep, and shook him till he got up. He was stupid beyond all
power of words to express; but at last came to a dim idea that he must get
home. Then the young navvy left him, anxious about being late at his
employment, and John Smith slowly felt his way to his own door. His wife,
already up, opened it. "Thee varmint! thee never gi'ed I that shilling last
night for the baker." Smith felt hopelessly in his pocket, and then looked at
her vacantly. "Thee drunken, nasty old——," said the infuriated woman,
almost unconsciously lifting her hand. Perhaps it was that action of hers
which suggested the same to his mind, which was in a mechanical state.
Perhaps the stinging words of last night had at last sunk deep enough to
scarify his self-esteem. Perhaps he did not at that moment fully remember
the strength of his own mighty arm. But he struck her, and she fell. Her
forehead came in contact with the cradle, in which the youngest boy was
sleeping, and woke him with a cry. She lay quite still. Smith sat stupidly
down on the old milking-stool, with his elbows on his knees. The shrill
voice of his wife, as she met him at the door, had brought more than one
female neighbour to the window; they saw what happened, and they were
there in a minute. Martha was only insensible, and they soon brought her to,
but the mark on the temple remained.
Five days afterwards John Smith, agricultural labourer, aged forty-five,
stood in the dock to answer a charge of assaulting his wife. There were five
magistrates on the Bench—two large landowners, a baronet in the chair, and
two clergymen. Martha Smith hung her head as they placed her in the
witness-box, and tried to evade kissing the Book, but the police saw that
that formality was complied with. The Clerk asked her what she had to
complain of. No answer. "Come, tell us all about it," said the eldest of the
magistrates in a fatherly tone of voice. Still silence. "Well, how did you get
that mark on your forehead?" asked the Clerk. No answer. "Speak up!"
cried a shrill voice in the body of the court. It was one of Martha's cronies,
who was immediately silenced by the police; but the train had been fired.

Martha would not fail before another woman. But she did not commence
about the assault. It was the drink she spoke of, nothing but the drink; and
as she talked of that she warmed with her subject and her grievances, and
forgot the old love for her husband, and her former hesitation, and placed
that vice in all its naked deformity and hideous results in plain but burning
words before the Bench. Had she been the cleverest advocate she could not
have prepared the ground for her case better. This tale of drink predisposed
their minds against the defendant. Only the Clerk, wedded to legal forms,
fidgeted under this eloquence, and seized the first pause: "But now, how
about the assault? Come to that," he said sharply. "I'm coming, sir," said
Martha; and she described Smith coming home, stupid and ferocious, after
staying out all night, and felling her to the ground because she asked him
for a shilling to buy the children's daily bread. Then she pointed to the
bruise on her forehead, and a suppressed murmur of indignation ran through
the Court, and angry looks were directed at the defendant. Did she do or say
anything to provoke the blow? asked the Chairman. No more than to ask for
the shilling. Did she not abuse him? Well, yes, she did; she owned she did
call him a drunken brute afterwards; she could not help it. These women,
with their rapid tongues, have a terrible advantage over the slower-witted
men.
Had the defendant any questions to ask his wife? Smith began to say that he
was very sorry, sir, but the Clerk snapped him up short. "That's your
defence. Have you any questions? No; well, call your witnesses." Martha
called her witnesses, the women living next door. They did not do her case
much good; they were too evidently eager to obtain the defendant's
condemnation. But, on the other hand, they did not do it any harm, for in
the main it was easy to see that they really corroborated her statements.
Smith asked them no questions; the labouring class rarely understand the
object of cross-questioning. If asked to do so they almost invariably begin
to tell their own tale.
"Now, then," said the Clerk, "what have you got to say for yourself—what's
your defence?" Smith looked down and stammered something. He was
confused; they checked him from telling his story when his mouth was full
of language, now it would not come. He did not know but that if he began
he might be checked again. The eldest magistrate on the Bench saw his
embarrassment, and, willing to assist him, spoke as kindly as he could

under the circumstances. "Speak up, John; tell us all about it. I am sorry to
see you there." "He's the finest, most stalwart man in my parish," he
continued, turning to the Chairman. Thus encouraged, John got out a word
or two. He was very sorry; he did not mean to hurt her; he knew he was
tipsy, and 'twas his own fault; she had been a good wife to him; she asked
him for money. Then all of a sudden John drew up his form to his full
height, and his chest swelled out, and he spoke in his own strong voice
clearly now that he had got a topic apart from his disgrace. These were his
words, a little softened into more civilised pronunciation to make them
intelligible:—
"She asked I for money, she did, and what was I to gi'e her? I hadn't a got a
shilling nor a sixpence, and she knew it, and knowed that I couldn't get one
either till Saturday night. I gets thirteen shillings a week from Master H.,
and a shilling on Sundays, and I hev got five children and a wife to keep out
of that—that's two shillings a week for each on us, that's just threepence
halfpenny a day, look 'ee, sir. And what victuals be I to buy wi' that, let
alone beer? and a man can't do no work wi'out a quart a day, and that's
fourpence, and there's my share, look 'ee, gone at onst. Wur be I to get any
victuals, and wur be I to get any clothes an' boots, I should like for to
know? And Jack he gets big and wants a main lot, and so did Polly, but her's
gone to the work'us', wuss luck. And parson wants I to send the young 'uns
to school, and pay a penny a week for 'em, and missis she wants a bit o'
bacon in the house and a loaf, and what good is that of, among all we? I
gets a slice of bacon twice a week, and sometimes narn. And beer—I knows
I drinks beer, and more as I ought, but what's a chap to do when he's a'most
shrammed wi' cold, and nar a bit o' nothin' in the pot but an old yeller swede
as hard as wood? And my teeth bean't as good as 'em used to be. I knows I
drinks beer, and so would anybody in my place—it makes me kinder stupid,
as I don't feel nothing then. Wot's the good—I've worked this thirty year or
more, since I wur big enough to go with the plough, and I've a knowed they
as have worked for nigh handy sixty, and wot do 'em get for it? All he'd a
got wur the rheumatiz. Yer med as well drink while 'ee can. I never meaned
to hurt her, and her knows it; and if it wurn't for a parcel of women a-
shoving on her on, her would never a come here agen me. I knows I drinks,
and what else be I to do? I can't work allus."

"But what are you going to say in your defence—do you say she provoked
you or anything?" asked the Clerk.
"No, I don't know as she provoked I. I wur provoked, though, I wur. I don't
bear no malice agen she. I ain't a got nothin' more for to say."
The magistrates retired, and the Chairman, on returning, said that this was a
most brutal and unprovoked assault, made all the worse by the previous
drinking habits of the defendant. If it had not been for the good character he
bore generally speaking (here he looked towards the elder magistrate, who
had evidently said a word in Smith's behalf), he would have had a month's
imprisonment, or more. As it was, he was committed for a fortnight, and to
pay the costs, or seven additional days; and he hoped this would be a
warning to him.
The elder magistrate looked at John Smith, and saw his jaw set firmly, and
his brow contract, and his heart was moved towards him.
"Cannot you get better wages than that, John?" he said. "At the railway they
would give you eighteen or twenty."
"It's so far to walk, sir, and my legs bean't as lissom as they used to be."
"But take the missis and live there."
"Lodgings is too dear, sir."
"Ah, exactly. Still I don't see how the farmers could pay you more. I'll see
what can be done for you."
Smith was led from the dock to the cell. The expenses were paid by an
unknown hand; but he underwent his fortnight's imprisonment. His wife
and children, with an empty larder, were obliged to go to the workhouse,
where also his daughter was at the same time confined of an illegitimate
child. This is no fiction, but an uncompromising picture of things as they
are. Who is to blame for them?

WILTSHIRE LABOURERS.
LETTER I.

(To the Editor of the "Times.")
Sir,—The Wiltshire agricultural labourer is not so highly paid as those of
Northumberland, nor so low as those of Dorset; but in the amount of his
wages, as in intelligence and general position, he may fairly be taken as an
average specimen of his class throughout a large portion of the kingdom.
As a man, he is usually strongly built, broad-shouldered, and massive in
frame, but his appearance is spoilt by the clumsiness of his walk and the
want of grace in his movements. Though quite as large in muscle, it is very
doubtful if he possesses the strength of the seamen who may be seen
lounging about the ports. There is a want of firmness, a certain disjointed
style, about his limbs, and the muscles themselves have not the hardness
and tension of the sailor's. The labourer's muscle is that of a cart-horse, his
motions lumbering and slow. His style of walk is caused by following the
plough in early childhood, when the weak limbs find it a hard labour to pull
the heavy nailed boots from the thick clay soil. Ever afterwards he walks as
if it were an exertion to lift his legs. His food may, perhaps, have something
to do with the deadened slowness which seems to pervade everything he
does—there seems a lack of vitality about him. It consists chiefly of bread
and cheese, with bacon twice or thrice a week, varied with onions, and if he
be a milker (on some farms) with a good "tuck-out" at his employer's
expense on Sundays. On ordinary days he dines at the fashionable hour of
six or seven in the evening—that is, about that time his cottage scents the
road with a powerful odour of boiled cabbage, of which he eats an immense
quantity. Vegetables are his luxuries, and a large garden, therefore, is the
greatest blessing he can have. He eats huge onions raw; he has no idea of
flavouring his food with them, nor of making those savoury and inviting
messes or vegetable soups at which the French peasantry are so clever. In
Picardy I have often dined in a peasant's cottage, and thoroughly enjoyed
the excellent soup he puts upon the table for his ordinary meal. To dine in

an English labourer's cottage would be impossible. His bread is generally
good, certainly; but his bacon is the cheapest he can buy at small second-
class shops—oily, soft, wretched stuff; his vegetables are cooked in
detestable style, and eaten saturated with the pot liquor. Pot liquor is a
favourite soup. I have known cottagers actually apply at farmers' kitchens
not only for the pot liquor in which meat has been soddened, but for the
water in which potatoes have been boiled—potato liquor—and sup it up
with avidity. And this not in times of dearth or scarcity, but rather as a
relish. They never buy anything but bacon; never butchers' meat.
Philanthropic ladies, to my knowledge, have demonstrated over and over
again even to their limited capacities that certain parts of butchers' meat can
be bought just as cheap, and will make more savoury and nutritive food;
and even now, with the present high price of meat, a certain proportion
would be advantageous. In vain; the labourers obstinately adhere to the pig,
and the pig only. When, however, an opportunity does occur the amount of
food they will eat is something astonishing. Once a year, at the village club
dinner, they gormandise to repletion. In one instance I knew of a man eating
a plate of roast beef (and the slices are cut enormously thick at these
dinners), a plate of boiled beef, then another of boiled mutton, and then a
fourth of roast mutton, and a fifth of ham. He said he could not do much to
the bread and cheese; but didn't he go into the pudding! I have even heard
of men stuffing to the fullest extent of their powers, and then retiring from
the table to take an emetic of mustard and return to a second gorging. There
is scarcely any limit to their power of absorbing beer. I have known reapers
and mowers make it their boast that they could lie on their backs and never
take the wooden bottle (in the shape of a small barrel) from their lips till
they had drunk a gallon, and from the feats I have seen I verily believe it a
fact. The beer they get is usually poor and thin, though sometimes in
harvest the farmers bring out a taste of strong liquor, but not till the work is
nearly over; for from this very practice of drinking enormous quantities of
small beer the labourer cannot drink more than a very limited amount of
good liquor without getting tipsy. This is why he so speedily gets inebriated
at the alehouse. While mowing and reaping many of them lay in a small
cask.
They are much better clothed now than formerly. Corduroy trousers and
slops are the usual style. Smock-frocks are going out of use, except for

milkers and faggers. Almost every labourer has his Sunday suit, very often
really good clothes, sometimes glossy black, with the regulation
"chimneypot." His unfortunate walk betrays him, dress how he will. Since
labour has become so expensive it has become a common remark among
the farmers that the labourer will go to church in broadcloth and the masters
in smock-frocks. The labourer never wears gloves—that has to come with
the march of the times; but he is particularly choice over his necktie. The
women must dress in the fashion. A very respectable draper in an
agricultural district was complaining to me the other day that the poorest
class of women would have everything in the fashionable style, let it change
as often as it would. In former times, if he laid in a stock of goods suited to
tradesmen, and farmers' wives and daughters, if the fashion changed, or
they got out of date, he could dispose of them easily to the servants. Now
no such thing. The quality did not matter so much, but the style must be the
style of the day—no sale for remnants. The poorest girl, who had not got
two yards of flannel on her back, must have the same style of dress as the
squire's daughter—Dolly Vardens, chignons, and parasols for ladies who
can work all day reaping in the broiling sun of August! Gloves, kid, for
hands that milk the cows!
The cottages now are infinitely better than they were. There is scarcely
room for further improvement in the cottages now erected upon estates.
They have three bedrooms, and every appliance and comfort compatible
with their necessarily small size. It is only the cottages erected by the
labourers themselves on waste plots of ground which are open to objection.
Those he builds himself are, indeed, as a rule, miserable huts, disgraceful to
a Christian country. I have an instance before me at this moment where a
man built a cottage with two rooms and no staircase or upper apartments,
and in those two rooms eight persons lived and slept—himself and wife,
grown-up daughters, and children. There was not a scrap of garden
attached, not enough to grow half-a-dozen onions. The refuse and sewage
was flung into the road, or filtered down a ditch into the brook which
supplied that part of the village with water. In another case at one time there
was a cottage in which twelve persons lived. This had upper apartments, but
so low was the ceiling that a tall man could stand on the floor, with his head
right through the opening for the staircase, and see along the upper floor
under the beds! These squatters are the curse of the community. It is among

them that fever and kindred infectious diseases break out; it is among them
that wretched couples are seen bent double with rheumatism and affections
of the joints caused by damp. They have often been known to remain so
long, generation after generation, in these wretched hovels, that at last the
lord of the manor, having neglected to claim quit-rent, they can defy him,
and claim them as their own property, and there they stick, eyesores and
blots, the fungi of the land. The cottages erected by farmers or by landlords
are now, one and all, fit and proper habitations for human beings; and I
verily believe it would be impossible throughout the length and breadth of
Wiltshire to find a single bad cottage on any large estate, so well and so
thoroughly have the landed proprietors done their work. On all farms
gardens are attached to the cottages, in many instances very large, and
always sufficient to produce enough vegetables for the resident. In villages
the allotment system has been greatly extended of late years, and has been
found most beneficial, both to owners and tenants. As a rule the allotments
are let at a rate which may be taken as £4 per annum—a sum which pays
the landlord very well, and enables the labourer to remunerate himself. In
one village which came under my observation the clergyman of the parish
has turned a portion of his glebe land into allotments—a most excellent and
noble example, which cannot be too widely followed or too much extolled.
He is thus enabled to benefit almost every one of his poor parishioners, and
yet without destroying that sense of independence which is the great
characteristic of a true Englishman. He has issued a book of rules and
conditions under which these allotments are held, and he thus places a
strong check upon drunkenness and dissolute habits, indulgence in which is
a sure way to lose the portions of ground. There is scarcely an end to the
benefits of the allotment system. In villages there cannot be extensive
gardens, and the allotments supply their place. The extra produce above that
which supplies the table and pays the rent is easily disposed of in the next
town, and places many additional comforts in the labourer's reach. The
refuse goes to help support and fatten the labourer's pig, which brings him
in profit enough to pay the rent of his cottage, and the pig, in turn, manures
the allotment. Some towns have large common lands, held under certain
conditions; such are Malmesbury, with 500 acres, and Tetbury (the common
land of which extends two miles), both these being arable, &c. These are
not exactly in the use of labourers, but they are in the hands of a class to
which the labourer often rises. Many labourers have fruit-trees in their

gardens, which, in some seasons, prove very profitable. In the present year,
to my knowledge, a labourer sold £4 worth of apples; and another made £3,
10s. off the produce of one pear-tree, pears being scarce.
To come at last to the difficult question of wages. In Wiltshire there has
been no extended strike, and very few meetings upon the subject, for the
simple reason that the agitators can gain no hold upon a county where, as a
mass, the labourers are well paid. The common day-labourer receives 10s.,
11s., and 12s. a week, according to the state of supply and demand for
labour in various districts; and, if he milks, 1s. more, making 13s. a week,
now common wages. These figures are rather below the mark; I could give
instances of much higher pay. To give a good idea of the wages paid I will
take the case of a hill farmer (arable, Marlborough Downs), who paid this
last summer during harvest 18s. per week per man. His reapers often earned
10s. a day—enough to pay their year's rent in a week. These men lived in
cottages on the farm, with three bedrooms each, and some larger, with every
modern appliance, each having a garden of a quarter of an acre attached and
close at hand, for which cottage and garden they paid 1s. per week rent. The
whole of these cottages were insured by the farmer himself, their furniture,
&c., in one lump, and the insurance policy cost him, as nearly as possible,
1s. 3d. per cottage per year. For this he deducted 1s. per year each from
their wages. None of the men would have insured unless he had insisted
upon doing it for them. These men had from six to eight quarts of beer per
man (over and above their 18s. a week) during harvest every day. In spring
and autumn their wages are much increased by piece-work, hoeing, &c. In
winter the farmer draws their coal for them in his waggons, a distance of
eight miles from the nearest wharf, enabling them to get it at cost price.
This is no slight advantage, for, at the present high price of coal, it is sold,
delivered in the villages, at 2s. per cwt. Many who cannot afford it in the
week buy a quarter of a cwt. on Saturday night, to cook their Sunday's
dinner with, for 6d. This is at the rate of £2 per ton. Another gentleman, a
large steam cultivator in the Vale, whose name is often before the public,
informs me that his books show that he paid £100 in one year in cash to one
cottage for labour, showing the advantage the labourer possesses over the
mechanic, since his wife and child can add to his income. Many farmers
pay £50 and £60 a year for beer drunk by their labourers—a serious
addition to their wages. The railway companies and others who employ

mechanics, do not allow them any beer. The allowance of a good cottage
and a quarter of an acre of garden for 1s. per week is not singular. Many
who were at the Autumn Manœuvres of the present year may remember
having a handsome row of houses, rather than cottages, pointed out to them
as inhabited by labourers at 1s. per week. In the immediate neighbourhood
of large manufacturing towns 1s. 6d. a week is sometimes paid; but then
these cottages would in such positions readily let to mechanics for 3s., 4s.,
and even 5s. per week. There was a great outcry when the Duke of
Marlborough issued an order that the cottages on his estate should in future
only be let to such men as worked upon the farms where those cottages
were situated. In reality this was the very greatest blessing the Duke could
have conferred upon the agricultural labourer; for it ensured him a good
cottage at a nearly nominal rent and close to his work; whereas in many
instances previously the cottages on the farms had been let at a high rate to
the mechanics, and the labourer had to walk miles before he got to his
labour. Cottages are not erected by landowners or by farmers as paying
speculations. It is well known that the condition of things prevents the
agricultural labourer from being able to pay a sufficient rent to be a fair
percentage upon the sum expended. In one instance a landlord has built
some cottages for his tenant, the tenant paying a certain amount of interest
on the sum invested by the landlord. Now, although this is a matter of
arrangement, and not of speculation—that is, although the interest paid by
the tenant is a low percentage upon the money laid out, yet the rent paid by
the labourers inhabiting these cottages to the tenant does not reimburse him
what he pays his landlord as interest—not by a considerable margin. But
then he has the advantage of his labourers close to his work, always ready at
hand.
Over and above the actual cash wages of the labourer, which are now very
good, must be reckoned his cottage and garden, and often a small orchard,
at a nominal rent, his beer at his master's expense, piece-work, gleaning
after harvest, &c., which alter his real position very materially. In
Gloucestershire, on the Cotswolds, the best-paid labourers are the
shepherds, for in that great sheep-country much trust is reposed in them. At
the annual auctions of shearlings which are held upon the large farms a
purse is made for the shepherd of the flock, into which every one who
attends is expected to drop a shilling, often producing £5. The shepherds on

the Wiltshire downs are also well paid, especially in lambing-time, when
the greatest watchfulness and care are required. It has been stated that the
labourer has no chance of rising from his position. This is sheer cant. He
has very good opportunities of rising, and often does rise, to my knowledge.
At this present moment I could mention a person who has risen from a
position scarcely equal to that of a labourer, not only to have a farm
himself, but to place his sons in farms. Another has just entered on a farm;
and several more are on the highroad to that desirable consummation. If a
labourer possesses any amount of intelligence he becomes head-carter or
head-fagger, as the case may be; and from that to be assistant or under-
bailiff, and finally bailiff. As a bailiff he has every opportunity to learn the
working of a farm, and is often placed in entire charge of a farm at a
distance from his employer's residence. In time he establishes a reputation
as a practical man, and being in receipt of good wages, with very little
expenditure, saves some money. He has now little difficulty in obtaining the
promise of a farm, and with this can readily take up money. With average
care he is a made man. Others rise from petty trading, petty dealing in pigs
and calves, till they save sufficient to rent a small farm, and make that the
basis of larger dealing operations. I question very much whether a clerk in a
firm would not find it much more difficult, as requiring larger capital, to
raise himself to a level with his employer than an agricultural labourer does
to the level of a farmer.
Many labourers now wander far and wide as navvies, &c., and perhaps
when these return home, as most of them do, to agricultural labour, they are
the most useful and intelligent of their class, from a readiness they possess
to turn their hand to anything. I know one at this moment who makes a
large addition to his ordinary wages by brewing for the small inns, and very
good liquor he brews, too. They pick up a large amount of practical
knowledge.
The agricultural women are certainly not handsome; I know no peasantry so
entirely uninviting. Occasionally there is a girl whose nut-brown
complexion and sloe-black eyes are pretty, but their features are very rarely
good, and they get plain quickly, so soon as the first flush of youth is past.
Many have really good hair in abundance, glossy and rich, perhaps from its
exposure to the fresh air. But on Sundays they plaster it with strong-
smelling pomade and hair-oil, which scents the air for yards most

unpleasantly. As a rule, it may safely be laid down that the agricultural
women are moral, far more so than those of the town. Rough and rude jokes
and language are, indeed, too common; but that is all. No evil comes of it.
The fairs are the chief cause of immorality. Many an honest, hard-working
servant-girl owes her ruin to these fatal mops and fairs, when liquor to
which she is unaccustomed overcomes her. Yet it seems cruel to take from
them the one day or two of the year on which they can enjoy themselves
fairly in their own fashion. The spread of friendly societies, patronised by
the gentry and clergy, with their annual festivities, is a remedy which is
gradually supplying them with safer, and yet congenial, amusement. In what
may be termed lesser morals I cannot accord either them or the men the
same praise. They are too ungrateful for the many great benefits which are
bountifully supplied them—the brandy, the soup, and fresh meat readily
extended without stint from the farmer's home in sickness to the cottage are
too quickly forgotten. They who were most benefited are often the first to
most loudly complain and to backbite. Never once in all my observation
have I heard a labouring man or woman make a grateful remark; and yet I
can confidently say that there is no class of persons in England who receive
so many attentions and benefits from their superiors as the agricultural
labourers. Stories are rife of their even refusing to work at disastrous fires
because beer was not immediately forthcoming. I trust this is not true; but it
is too much in character. No term is too strong in condemnation for those
persons who endeavour to arouse an agitation among a class of people so
short-sighted and so ready to turn against their own benefactors and their
own interest. I am credibly informed that one of these agitators,
immediately after the Bishop of Gloucester's unfortunate but harmlessly
intended speech at the Gloucester Agricultural Society's dinner—one of
these agitators mounted a platform at a village meeting and in plain
language incited and advised the labourers to duck the farmers! The
agricultural women either go out to field-work or become indoor servants.
In harvest they hay-make—chiefly light work, as raking—and reap, which
is much harder labour; but then, while reaping they work their own time, as
it is done by the piece. Significantly enough, they make longer hours while
reaping. They are notoriously late to arrive, and eager to return home, on
the hay-field. The children help both in haymaking and reaping. In spring
and autumn they hoe and do other piece-work. On pasture farms they beat
clots or pick up stones out of the way of the mowers' scythes. Occasionally,

but rarely now, they milk. In winter they wear gaiters, which give the ankles
a most ungainly appearance. Those who go out to service get very low
wages at first from their extreme awkwardness, but generally quickly rise.
As dairymaids they get very good wages indeed. Dairymaids are scarce and
valuable. A dairymaid who can be trusted to take charge of a dairy will
sometimes get £20 besides her board (liberal) and sundry perquisites. These
often save money, marry bailiffs, and help their husbands to start a farm.
In the education provided for children Wiltshire compares favourably with
other counties. Long before the passing of the recent Act in reference to
education the clergy had established schools in almost every parish, and
their exertions have enabled the greater number of places to come up to the
standard required by the Act, without the assistance of a School Board. The
great difficulty is the distance children have to walk to school, from the
sparseness of population and the number of outlying hamlets. This
difficulty is felt equally by the farmers, who, in the majority of cases, find
themselves situated far from a good school. In only one place has anything
like a cry for education arisen, and that is on the extreme northern edge of
the county. The Vice-Chairman of the Swindon Chamber of Agriculture
recently stated that only one-half of the entire population of Inglesham
could read and write. It subsequently appeared that the parish of Inglesham
was very sparsely populated, and that a variety of circumstances had
prevented vigorous efforts being made. The children, however, could attend
schools in adjoining parishes, not farther than two miles, a distance which
they frequently walk in other parts of the country.
Those who are so ready to cast every blame upon the farmer, and to
represent him as eating up the earnings of his men and enriching himself
with their ill-paid labour, should remember that farming, as a rule, is carried
on with a large amount of borrowed capital. In these days, when £6 an acre
has been expended in growing roots for sheep, when the slightest
derangement of calculation in the price of wool, meat, or corn, or the loss of
a crop, seriously interferes with a fair return for capital invested, the farmer
has to sail extremely close to the wind, and only a little more would find his
canvas shaking. It was only recently that the cashier of the principal bank of
an agricultural county, after an unprosperous year, declared that such
another season would make almost every farmer insolvent. Under these
circumstances it is really to be wondered at that they have done as much as

they have for the labourer in the last few years, finding him with better
cottages, better wages, better education, and affording him better
opportunities of rising in the social scale.—I am, Sir, faithfully yours,
Richard Jefferies.
Coate Farm, Swindon, Nov. 12, 1872.

Lord Shaftesbury, in the Times, Dec. 6th, says:—
"It is our duty and our interest to elevate the present condition of the
labourer, and to enable him to assert and enjoy every one of his rights. But I
must agree with Mr. Jefferies that, even under the actual system of things,
numerous instances have occurred of a rise in the social scale as the result
of temperance, good conduct, and economy. He has furnished some
examples. I will give only one from my own estate:—'T. M. was for many
years shepherd to Farmer P——; he bought with his savings a small
leasehold property at —— for £170, and he had accumulated £100 besides.
He had brought up a son and three daughters, and his son now occupies the
leasehold.' This is the statement as given to me in writing."

LETTER II.

(To the Editor of the "Times.")
Sir,—I did not intend to make any reply to the numerous attacks made upon
my letter published in the Times of the 14th inst., but the statements made
by "The Son of a Wiltshire Labourer" are such as I feel bound to resent on
the part of the farmers of this county.
He says he wishes the landed proprietors would take as much care to
provide cottages for their labourers as I represent them as doing. I repeat

what I said, that the cottages on large estates are now, one and all, fit
habitations for human beings. The Duke of Marlborough is a large
proprietor of cottages in this neighbourhood, and his plan has been,
whenever a cottage did not appear sufficiently commodious, to throw two
into one. The owner of the largest estate near Swindon has been engaged for
many years past in removing the old thatched mud hovels, and replacing
them with substantial, roomy, and slate-roofed buildings. Farmers are
invariably anxious to have good cottages. There is a reluctance to destroy
the existing ones, both from the inconvenience and the uncertainty
sometimes of others being erected. Often, too, the poor have the strongest
attachment to the cabin in which they were born and bred, and would
strongly resent its destruction, though obviously for their good. Farmers
never build bad cottages now. When a tenement falls in, either from decay
or the death of the tenant, the cottage which is erected on its site is
invariably a good one. A row of splendid cottages has recently been erected
at Wanborough. They are very large, with extensive gardens attached. Some
even begin to complain that the cottages now erected are in a sense "too
good" for the purpose. The system of three bedrooms is undoubtedly the
best from a sanitary point of view, but it is a question whether the
widespread belief in that system, and that system alone, has not actually
retarded the erection of reasonably good buildings. It is that third bedroom
which just prevents the investment of building a cottage from paying a
remunerative percentage on the capital expended. Two bedrooms are easily
made—the third puzzles the builder where to put it with due regard to
economy. Nor is a third bedroom always required. Out of ten families
perhaps only two require a third bedroom; in this way there is a large waste
in erecting a row. It has been suggested that a row should consist of so
many cottages with two bedrooms only for families who do not want more,
and at each end a building with three bedrooms for larger families. In one
instance two cottages were ordered to be erected on an estate, the estimate
for which was £640; these when completed might have let for £10 per
annum, or 1¾ per cent, on the capital invested! The plans for these cottages
had so many dormer windows, porches, intricacies of design in variegated
tiles, &c., that the contractor gave it up as a bad job. I mention this to show
that the tendency to build good cottages has gone even beyond what was
really required, and ornamentation is added to utility.

Then it is further stated that the labourer cannot build cottages. I could
name a lane at this moment the cottages in which were one and all built by
labourers; and there are half-a-dozen in this village which were erected by
regular farm labourers. The majority of these are, as I said before, wretched
hovels, but there are two or three which demonstrate that the labourer, if he
is a thrifty man, earns quite sufficient to enable him to erect a reasonably
good building. The worst hovel I ever saw (it was mentioned in my letter of
the 14th) was built by a man who is notorious for his drinking habits. Some
forty years ago, when wages were much lower than they are now, two
labourers, to my knowledge, took possession of a strip of waste land by the
roadside, and built themselves cottages. One of these was a very fair
building; the other would certainly be condemned now-a-days. The lord of
the manor claimed these; and the difficulty was thus adjusted:—The
builders were to receive the value of their tenements from the lord of the
manor, and were to remain permanent tenants for life on payment of a small
percentage, interest upon the purchase-money, as quit-rent. On their deaths
the cottages were to become the property of the lord of the manor. One man
received £40 for his cottage, the other £20, which sums forty years ago
represented relatively a far higher value than now, and demonstrate
conclusively that the labourer, if he is a steady, hard-working man, can
build a cottage. Another cottage I know of, built by a farm labourer, is really
a very creditable building—good walls, floors, staircase, sashes, doors; it
stands high, and appears very comfortable, and even pleasant, in summer,
for they are a thrifty family, and can even display flower-pots in the
window. Other cottages have been built or largely added to in my memory
by labourers. On these occasions they readily obtain help from the farmers.
One lends his team and waggons to draw the stones; another supplies wood
for nothing; but of late I must admit there has been some reluctance to assist
in this way (unless for repairs) because it was so often found that the
buildings thus erected were not fit habitations. The Boards of Guardians
often find a difficulty from the limited ownership of some of the labourers,
who apply for relief, of their cottages. Perhaps they have not paid quit-rent
for a year or two; but still they cannot sell, and yet it seems unjust to the
ratepayers to assist a man who has a tenement which he at least calls his
own, and from which he cannot be ejected, I know a labourer at this
moment living in a cottage originally built by his father, and added to by
himself by the assistance of the neighbouring farmers. This man has been

greatly assisted by one farmer in particular, who advanced him money by
which he purchased a horse and cart, and was enabled to do a quantity of
hauling, flint-carting for the waywardens, and occasionally to earn money
by assisting to carry a farmer's harvest. He rents a large piece of arable land,
and ought to be comparatively well off.
"The Son of a Wiltshire Labourer" complains that the farmers or proprietors
do not make sufficient efforts to supply the cottages with water. The lord of
the manor and the tenant of the largest farms in this immediate
neighbourhood have but just sunk a well for their cottages; previously they
had got their supply from a pump in an adjacent farmyard thrown open by
the proprietor to all the village.
It is the labourer himself who will not rise. In a village with which I am
acquainted great efforts have been made by a farmer and a gentleman living
near to provide proper school instruction for the children. One labourer was
asked why he did not send his children to school. He replied, "Because he
could not afford it." "But," said the farmer, "it is only threepence
altogether." "Oh, no; he could not afford it." The farmer explained to him
that the object was to avoid a School Board, which, in other places, had the
power to fine for not sending children to school. "No, he could not afford
it." The farmer's books show that this labourer, his wife, and two children
received 28s. 6d. per week, his cottage rent free, and a very large garden at
a low rent. Yet he could not afford the 3d. a week which would enable his
children ultimately to take a better position in the world! The same farmer,
who is a liberal and large-minded man, has endeavoured, without success,
to introduce the practice of paying in cash instead of beer, and also the
system of payment for overtime. The men say no, they would rather not. "In
wet weather," they say, "we do no work, but you pay us; and if we work a
little later in harvest, it only makes it fair." They would not take money
instead of beer. In another case which came under my personal observation
in the middle of last summer, a farmer announced his intention of paying in
cash instead of allowing beer. In the very press of the haymaking, with
acres upon acres of grass spoiling, his men, one and all, struck work
because he would not give them beer, and went over to a neighbour's field
adjacent and worked for him for nothing but their share in the beer. If
labourers work longer hours in harvest (corn), it is because it is piece-work,
and they thereby make more money. I contend that the payment in kind, the

beer, the gleanings, the piece-work, the low and nominal cottage rent, the
allotment ground and produce, and the pig (not restricted to one pig in a
year), may fairly be taken as an addition to their wages. I am informed that
in one parish the cottage rents vary from 10d. to 1s. 2d. per week; nearly all
have gardens, and all may have allotments up to a quarter of an acre each at
3d. per lug, or 40s. per acre. I am also informed of a labourer renting a
cottage and garden at 1s. per week, the fruit-trees in whose garden produced
this year three sacks of damsons, which he sold at 1s. 6d. per gallon, or £6,
18s. I know of a case in which a labourer—an earnest, intelligent, hard-
working man—makes £2 a week on an average all the year round. But then
he works only at piece-work, going from farm to farm, and this is, of
course, an exceptional case. The old men, worn out with age and infirmity,
are kept on year after year by many farmers out of charity, rather than let
them go to the workhouse, though totally useless and a dead loss, especially
as occupying valuable cottage-room. There is a society, the annual meetings
of which are held at Chippenham, and which is supported by the clergy,
gentry, and farmers generally of North Wilts, for the object of promoting
steady habits among the labourers and rewarding cases of long and
deserving services. There is also a friendly society on the best and most
reliable basis, supported by the gentry, and introduced as far as possible into
villages. The labourers on the Great Western Railway works at Swindon
earn from 15s. a week upwards, according as they approach to skilled
workmen. Attracted by these wages, most of the young men of the
neighbourhood try the factory, but, usually, after a short period return to
farm-work, the result of their experience being that they are better off as
agricultural labourers. Lodgings in the town close to the factory are very
expensive, and food in proportion; consequently they have to walk long
distances to their labour—some from Wanborough, five miles; Wroughton,
three and a half miles; Purton, four miles; and even Wootton Bassett, six
miles, which twice a day is a day's work in itself. Add to this the
temptations to spend money in towns, and the severe labour, and the man
finds himself better off with his quiet cottage and garden on a farm at 12s. a
week, and 1s. for milking, with beer, and a meal on Sundays. The skilled
mechanics, who earn 36s. to £2 per week, rent houses in the town at 6s. to
8s.; and in one case I knew of 12s. per week paid by a lodger for two
rooms. These prices cannot be paid out of the mechanic's wage;
consequently he sub-lets, or takes lodgers, and sometimes these sub-let, and

the result is an overcrowding worse than that of the agricultural cottages,
around which there is at least fresh air and plenty of light (nearly as
important), which are denied in a town. The factory labourer and the
mechanic are liable to instant dismissal. The agricultural labourers (half of
them at least) are hired by the year or half-year, and cannot be summarily
sent along unless for misconduct. Wages have recently been increased by
the farmers of Wiltshire voluntarily and without pressure from threatened
strikes. It is often those who receive the highest wages who are the first to
come to the parish for relief. It is not uncommon for mechanics and others
to go for relief where it is discovered that they are in receipt of sick pay
from the yard club, and sometimes from two friendly societies, making 18s.
a week. A manufacturing gentleman informed me that the very men whom
he had been paying £8 a week to were the first to apply for relief when
distress came and the mills stopped. It is not low wages, then, which causes
improvident habits. The only result of deporting agricultural labourers to
different counties is to equalise the wages paid all over England. This
union-assisted emigration affords the improvident labourer a good
opportunity of transporting himself to a distant county, and leaving deeply
in debt with the tradesmen with whom he has long dealt. I am informed that
this is commonly the case with emigrating labourers. A significant fact is
noted in the leader of the Labour News of the 16th of November; the return
of certain emigrants from America is announced as "indicative that higher
quotations are not always representative of greater positive advantages."
The agricultural labourer found that out when he returned from the factory
at 15s. per week to farm labour at 12s. I am positive that the morality of the
country compares favourably with that of the town. I was particularly struck
with this fact on a visit to the Black Country. One of the worst parishes for
immorality in Wiltshire is one where glovemaking is carried on; singularly
enough, manufactures and immorality seem to go together. "The Son of a
Labourer" says that all the advantages the labourer does possess are owing
to the exertions of the clergy; pray who support the clergy but the farmers?
I think that the facts I have mentioned sufficiently demonstrate that the
farmers and the landlords of Wiltshire have done their duty, and more than
their mere duty, towards the labourers; and only a little investigation will
show that at present it is out of their power to do more. Take the case of a
farmer entering a dairy-farm of, say, 250 acres, and calculate his immediate

outgoings—say fifty cows at £20, £1,000; two horses at £25, £50; waggons,
carts, implements, £100; labour, three men at 12s. per week, £94; harvest
labour, £20; dairymaid £10; tithe, taxes, rates, &c., £100; rent, £2 per acre,
£500. Total, £1874. In other words (exclusive of the capital invested in
stock), the outgoings amount to £724 per annum; against which put—fifty
cows' milk, &c., at £10 per head, £500; fifty calves, £100; fifty tons of hay
at £3, 10s., £175. Total income, £775; balance in hand, £51. Then comes the
village school subscription; sometimes a church rate (legally voluntary, but
morally binding), &c.
So that, in hard figures (all these are below the mark, if anything), there is
positively nothing left for the farmer but a house and garden free. How,
then, is money made? By good judgment in crops, in stock, by lucky
accidents. On a dairy-farm the returns begin immediately; on an arable one
there is half a year at least to wait. The care, the judgment, required to be
exercised is something astonishing, and a farmer is said to be all his life
learning his trade. If sheep are dear and pay well, the farmer plants roots;
then, perhaps, after a heavy expenditure for manure, for labour, and seed,
there comes the fly, or a drought, and his capital is sunk. On the other hand,
if the season be good, roots are cheap and over-plentiful, and where is his
profit then? He works like a labourer himself in all weathers and at all
times; he has the responsibility and the loss, yet he is expected to find the
labourer, not only good cottages, allotments, schooling, good wages, but
Heaven knows what besides. Supposing the £1874 (on the dairy-farm) be
borrowed capital for which he must pay at least 4 per cent.—and few,
indeed, are there who get money at that price—it is obvious how hard he
must personally work, how hard, too, he must live, to make both ends meet.
And it speaks well for his energy and thrift that I heard a bank director not
long since remark that he had noticed, after all, with every drawback, the
tenant farmers had made as a rule more money in proportion than their
landlords. A harder-working class of men does not exist than the Wiltshire
farmers.
Only a few days ago I saw in your valuable paper a list, nearly a column
long, of the millionaires who had died in the last ten years. It would be
interesting to know how much they had spent for the benefit of the
agricultural labourer. Yet no one attacks them. They pay no poor-rates, no
local taxation, or nothing in proportion. The farmer pays the poor-rate

which supports the labourer in disease, accident, and old age; the highway
rates on which the millionaire's carriage rolls; and very soon the turnpike
trusts will fall in, and the farmers—i.e., the land—will have to support the
imperial roads also. With all these heavy burdens on his back, having to
compete against the world, he has yet no right to compensation for his
invested capital if he is ordered to quit. Without some equalisation of local
taxation—as I have shown, the local taxes often make another rent almost
—without a recognised tenant-right, not revolutionary, but for unexhausted
improvements, better security, so that he can freely invest capital, the
farmer cannot—I reiterate it, he cannot—do more than he has done for the
labourer. He would then employ more skilled labour, and wages would be
better. And, after all that he does for them, he dares not find fault, or he may
find his ricks blazing away—thanks to the teaching of the agitators that the
farmers are tyrants, and, by inference, that to injure them is meritorious.
There is a poster in Swindon now offering £20 reward for the discovery of
the person who maliciously set fire to a rick of hay in Lord Bolingbroke's
park at Lydiard.
If any farmers are hard upon their men, it is those who have themselves
been labourers and have risen to be employers of labour. These very often
thoroughly understand the art of getting the value of a man's wage out of
him. I deliberately affirm that the true farmers, one and all, are in favour of
that maxim of a well-known and respected agriculturist of our county—"A
fair day's wage for a fair day's work."
I fear the farmers of Wiltshire would be only too happy to ride thorough-
breds to the hunt, and see their daughters driving phaetons, as they are
accused of doing; but I also fear that very, very few enjoy that privilege.
Most farmers, it is true, do keep some kind of vehicle; it is necessary when
their great distance from a town is considered, and the keep of a horse or
two comes to nothing on a large farm. It is customary for them to drive their
wives or daughters once a week on market-days into the nearest town. If
here and there an energetic man succeeds in making money, and is able to
send his son to a university, all honour to him. I hope the farmers will send
their sons to universities; the spread of education in their class will be of as
much advantage to the community as among the labouring population, for it
will lead to the more general application of science to the land and a higher

amount of production. If the labourer attempted to rise he would be praised;
why not the farmer?
It is simply an unjustifiable libel on the entire class to accuse them of wilful
extravagance. I deliberately affirm that the majority of farmers in Wiltshire
are exactly the reverse; that, while they practise a generous hospitality to a
friend or a stranger, they are decidedly saving and frugal rather than
extravagant, and they are compelled to be so by the condition of their
finances. To prove that their efforts are for the good of the community I
need only allude to the work of the late Mr. Stratton, so crowned with
success in improving the breed of cattle—a work in the sister county of
Gloucester so ably carried on at this present moment by Mr. Edward Bowly,
and by Mr. Lane and Mr. Garne in the noted Cotswold sheep. The breeds
produced by these gentlemen have in a manner impregnated the whole
world, imported as they have been to America and Australia. It was once
ably said that the readings of the English Bible Sunday after Sunday in our
churches had preserved our language pure for centuries; and, in the same
way, I do verily believe that the English (not the Wiltshire only, but the
English) farmer as an institution, with his upright, untainted ideas of
honour, honesty, and morality, has preserved the tone of society from that
corruption which has so miserably degraded France—so much so that
Dumas recently scientifically predicted that France was en route à
prostitution générale. Just in the same way his splendid constitution as a
man recruits the exhausted, pale, nervous race who dwell in cities, and
prevents the Englishman from physically degenerating.—I am, Sir,
faithfully yours,
Richard Jefferies.
Coate Farm, Swindon, November 25, 1872.

THE ALLOTMENT SYSTEM.

(To the Editor of the "Times.")

Sir,—Many gentlemen having written to me for further information upon
the system of glebe allotments for labourers mentioned in my letter to the
Times of November 14, it has occurred to me that the following facts may
be interesting:—
The glebe alluded to was that of Lyddington, near Swindon, and the plan
was originated by the late incumbent, Mr. May, but carried out into a
complete system by the present much-respected rector, the Rev. H. Munn.
The land itself is situated not more than 300 yards from the village of
Lyddington, by the side of a good turnpike-road, and is traversed by two
roads giving easy access to every allotment. Each plot of ground is divided
from the next by a narrow green path: no hedges or mounds are permitted,
and the field itself is enclosed without a hedge to harbour birds. The soil is a
rich dark loam, yielding good crops, with very little manure, and the surface
is level. There are sixty-three tenants occupying plots varying in size,
according to circumstances, from 48 "lug" downwards—25, 30, 16, &c. A
"lug" is a provincialism for perch. The rent is 5d. per "lug" or perch, and
each occupier on becoming a tenant receives a card on which the following
rules are printed in large type:—

"LYDDINGTON GARDEN ALLOTMENTS.
"RULES AND REGULATIONS.
"1. The land shall be cultivated by the spade only, and proper attention
shall be paid to its cultivation.
"2. No allotment, or any part thereof, shall be under-let or exchanged.
"3. The rent shall be due on the 1st of September in each year, and
shall be paid before the crop is taken off the ground.
"4. All tenants shall maintain a character for morality and sobriety, and
shall not frequent a public-house on the Sabbath-day.
"5. If any tenant fail to pay his rent or to perform any of the foregoing
conditions he shall immediately forfeit his allotment, with his crop
upon the same, and the landlord or his agent shall take possession and
enforce payment of the rent due by sale of the crop or otherwise, as in
arrears of rent.

"All the tenants are earnestly requested to attend regularly at the House
of God during the times of Divine Service, with their families, to the
best of their abilities."

The object of Rule 2 is to enable the landlord to retain a certain amount of
influence over the tenant, to bring him in immediate contact with the tenant,
and to keep the land itself under his control. Many occupiers endeavour to
under-let their allotments, which, if permitted, would entirely defeat the
main object of the landlord, besides complicating the already great labour
of collecting the rents, &c.
Rule 3 prevents the produce of the allotment going to pay the public-house
score; while the date on which the rent falls due is so adjusted as to enable
the occupier to receive his money for harvest-work before paying it.
Rule 4 places a great restraint upon drunkenness and dissolute habits. Last
year the Rev. H. Munn addressed a private circular to his tenants, in which
he says:—
"Sad reports have been brought to me lately of the conduct of some in the
parish, and among them, I am sorry to say, are tenants of the Allotment
Gardens. Such conduct is contrary to the rules on which the allotments are
held, and also contrary to the intentions of my predecessor in letting them
out to the parishioners. They are intended to improve the condition of the
labourers and their families, giving them employment in the summer
evenings, increasing their supply of food, and withdrawing them from the
influence of the public-house. But when drinking habits are indulged all
these benefits are lost, and the allotments, which were intended to do the
labourer good, only increase his means of obtaining intoxicating drinks."
The landlord can, of course, exercise his discretion in enforcing Rule 5—
can allow time for payment, and in certain cases of misfortune, such as the
failure of the potato crop, remit it entirely. But this power must be sparingly
used, otherwise every one would endeavour to find excuses for non-
fulfilment of the contract.
The extent of the allotment is written on the back of the card of rules, with
the name of the tenant, thus:—"D. Hancock.—Lot 1, Lug 15; rent 6s. 3d.;"

and each payment is receipted underneath, with the date and initials of the
landlord.
The present landlord has in no case disturbed or removed the tenants
received by his predecessor, but where land has fallen in he has
endeavoured to arrange the extent of the new allotments made to suit the
requirements of families, and to allow of a sufficient crop of potatoes being
grown for one season on one half of the allotment, while the other half
bears different vegetables, and vice versâ for the next season, being the
same thing as a rotation of crops.
The field has recently been drained at the joint cost of landlord and tenant.
The Rev. H. Munn provided the drain-pipes, and the occupiers paid for the
labour, which latter came to £8, the amount being proportioned according to
the size of each allotment. The highest amount paid by any one tenant was,
I believe, £1 (for 48 "lug"), others going down to 1s.
The rent at 5d. per "lug" or perch comes to £3, 6s. 8d. per acre, an amount
which bears a proper relation to the rent of arable farming land, when the
labour of collecting so many small sums and other circumstances are taken
into consideration. The moral effect of the arrangement has been
incalculable—as one old woman pertinently remarked, "We needn't steal
now, sir." In the olden times the farmers' gardens were constantly subject to
depredations. The ordinary rate at which gardens are let in the
neighbourhood is 6d. per "lug." At Swindon, the nearest town (12,000
inhabitants), there are large allotment fields let at 1s. 6d. per "lug," or £12
per acre, and eagerly caught up at that price. These allotments are rented by
every class, from labourers and mechanics to well-to-do tradesmen.
The very first desire of every agricultural labourer's heart is a garden, and
so strong is the feeling that I have known men apply for permission to
cultivate the vacant space between the large double mounds of the hedges
on some pasture farms, and work hard at it despite the roots of the bushes
and the thefts of the rooks.
The facts mentioned above only add one more to the numberless ways in
which the noble clergy of the Church of England have been silently
labouring for the good of the people committed to their care for years

before the agitators bestowed one thought on the agricultural poor.—I am,
Sir, faithfully yours,
Richard Jefferies.
Coate Farm, Swindon.
(Published in the "Times," Nov. 23, 1872.)

A TRUE TALE OF THE WILTSHIRE
LABOURER.
"Now then—hold fast there—mind the furrow, Tim." The man who was
loading prepared himself for the shock, and the waggon safely jolted over
the furrow, and on between the wakes of light-brown hay, crackling to the
touch as if it would catch fire in the brilliant sunshine. The pitchers, one on
each side, stuck their prongs into the wakes and sent up great "pitches,"
clearing the ground rapidly, through emulation, for it was a point of honour
to keep pace with each other. Tim, the old man who had led the horses,
resumed his rake in the rear among the women, who instantly began teasing
the poor wretch.
"Tim, she's allus in the way," said one, purposely hitching her rake in his.
"Thur—get away."
"I shan't," said Tim, surly as crabbed age and incessant banter under a hot
sun could make him. "Now—mind, thee's break th' rake."
They both pulled as hard as they dared—each expecting the other to give
way, for the master was in sight, on horseback, by the rick, and a rake
broken wantonly would bring a sharp reprimand.
"Go it, Sal!" cried the loader on the waggon hoarsely, half choked with hay
dust. "Pull away!"
"Pull, Tim!" cried one of the pitchers.
"Ha! ha!" laughed two or three more women, closing round as the girl gave
a tug which nearly upset Tim and broke half-a-dozen teeth out of his rake.
"Darn thee!" growled the old fellow. The youngest of the girls at the same
moment gave him a push under the arm with the end of her rake-handle. It
was the last straw which broke the back of Tim's temper. Swearing, he
dropped the rake and seized a prong, and hobbled after the girl, who danced
away half in delight and half in terror.

"I'll job this into thee—darn thee—if I can come near thee, thee hussy!"
The "hussy" let him come near, and danced away again gracefully. She was
at once the most handsome and most impudent of his tormentors. There's no
saying whether the old man, roused as he was and incensed beyond control,
might not really have "jobbed," i.e., stabbed, his prong at her, had not one
of the pitchers left his wake and rushed on him.
"My eye!" shouted the loader, "Absalom's at 'un!"
Absalom took Tim by the shoulders and hurled him on the ground pretty
heavily. Flinging the prong twenty yards away, he threatened to knock his
head off if he didn't let Madge alone. Old Tim slowly got up and went off
after his tool, growling to himself, while Madge clung hold of Absalom's
arm, who, turning round, kissed her. The other women looked jealously on
as she followed him back to his wake, and kept close to him at his work.
Madge was tall and slenderly made. Her limbs were more delicately
proportioned than is usual among women accustomed to manual labour
from childhood. The rosy glow of health lit up her brown but clear cheek,
free from freckles and sun-spots. Her eyes, black as sloes, were fringed with
long dark eyelashes which gave their glances an espiègle expression. They
were very wicked-looking eyes, full of fun and mischief. Her dress, open at
the throat, displayed a faultless neck, but slightly sun-browned. Her curly
dark-brown hair escaped in ringlets down her back. A lovely nut-brown
maid!
Soft glances passed rapidly between Madge and Absalom, as she raked
behind him. They did not escape the jealous notice of the other women. It
was the last day of the hay-harvest—it was "hay home" that night.
Harvest is a time of freedom, but the last day resembles the ancient
Saturnalia, or rather perhaps the vine season in Italy, when the grape-
gatherers indulged their rude wit on every one who came near. Raillery and
banter poured incessantly on Madge and Absalom, who replied with equal
freedom.
"Grin away," shouted Absalom at last, half pleased, half irritated, as he
stuck his prong in the ground, and seizing Madge, kissed her before them
all. "Thur—I bean't ashamed on her!"

"Ha! ha! ha! Hoorah!" shouted the men. Madge slipped away towards the
rear, blushing scarlet. So absorbed had they been as not to notice the
approach of another waggon coming in the opposite direction, which was
now alongside. Seeing the kiss and hearing the laugh, one of the men,
following it, shouted in a stentorian voice, for which he was renowned—
"Darn my buttons if I won't have one of they!"
In an instant he was over the wake and caught Madge in his arms. But she
struggled and cried. Absalom was there in a moment.
"Go it, Roaring Billy!" shouted the followers of the other waggon. But
Absalom shook him free, and the girl darted away. The two men stood
fronting each other. Absalom was angry. Billy had had a trifle too much
beer. A quarrel was imminent, and fists were doubled, when the pitchers
rushed up and separated them.
The last pitch was now flung up, and the women began to decorate the
horses and the waggons with green boughs.
"Come on, Madge," said Absalom, "we'll ride whoam;" and despite of much
feminine shyness and many objections, and after much trouble and blushing
and rude jokes about legs, Madge was hoisted up, and Absalom followed
her. To the rickyard they rode in triumph among green boughs, and to the
rude chorus of a song.
At seven that evening the whole gang were collected in the farmer's great
kitchen. A huge room it was, paved with stone flags, the walls whitewashed,
and the ceiling being the roof itself, whose black beams were festooned
with cobwebs. Three or four tables had been arranged in a row, and there
was a strong smell of "dinner" from smoking joints. Absalom came in last.
He had spent some time in adorning himself in a white clean slop and new
corduroys, with a gay necktie and his grandfather's watch. His face shone
from a recent wash. It was an open countenance, which unconsciously
prepossessed one in his favour. Light-blue or grey eyes, which looked you
straight in the face, were overshadowed with rather thick eyebrows. His
forehead was well proportioned, and crowned with a mass of curling yellow
hair. A profusion of whiskers hid his chin, which perhaps in its shape
indicated a character too easy and yielding. His shoulders were broad; his

appearance one of great strength. But his mouth had a sensual look.
Absalom pushed in and out by Madge.
"What didst thee have to eat?" asked a crony of his afterwards.
"Aw," said Absalom, fetching a sigh at the remembrance of the good things.
"Fust I had a plate of rus beef, then a plate of boiled beef; then I had one of
boiled mutton, and next one of roast mutton; last, bacon. I found I couldn't
git on at all wi' th' pudding, but when the cheese and th' salad came, didn't I
pitch into that!"
Absalom's love did not spoil his appetite.
Soon as the dishes were removed, pipes were brought out and tankards sent
on their rounds. By this time poor old Tim's weak brains were muddled, and
he was discovered leaning back against the wall and mumbling out the tag-
end of an old song:—

"On' Humphry wi' his flail,
But Kitty she wur the charming ma-aid
To carry th' milking pa-ail!"

This set them on singing, and Roaring Billy insisted on bawling out at the
top of his stentorian lungs the doleful ditty of "Lord Bateman and his
Daughters," which ran to thirty verses, and lasted half-an-hour. Hardly were
the last words out of his mouth, when an impatient wight struck up the
"Leathern Bottel," and heartily did they all join in the chorus, down to
where the ballad describes the married man wanting to beat his wife, and
using a glass bottle for the purpose, which broke and let all the wine about:
—

"Whereas it had been the Leathern Bottel,
The stopper been in he might banged away well,"

without danger of creating an unanswerable argument in favour of leathern
bottles.
By this time they were pretty well "boozed." A thick cloud of tobacco-
smoke filled the kitchen. Heads were rolling about from side to side and

arms stretched over the tables among the débris of broken pipes and in
pools of spilt beer and froth. Despite these rude, unromantic surroundings,
Absalom and Madge were leaning close against each other, hand-in-hand,
almost silent, but looking in each other's eyes. What account takes passion
of pipes or beer, smoke or drunken men, of snores and hoarse voices? None:
they were oblivious of these things.

CHAPTER II.
A month after the "hay home" a gaily dressed party passed through the
fields towards the village church. Absalom and Madge went first, arm-in-
arm; followed by Roaring Billy, who was to give the bride away, with his
lady beside him. Behind these came two or three more couples, and last of
all, toiling along by herself, an old woman, bent nearly double; it was
Madge's mother. With laugh and light jest they pushed on merrily over the
stiles and through the brown autumn grass, covered with a lacework of
cobwebs. The ceremony passed off well enough, except that Billy, as best-
man, made the old arches of the church echo again with his response.
Absalom had taken a cottage of Farmer Humphreys. "I'd 'ave sooner had 'un
of anybody else," said he, "but thur war nur anuther to be had, and it bean't
such a bad 'un nither, only Measter Humphreys be hardish in the mouth."
By the which he meant that Humphreys had the reputation of being rather
harsh in his dealings with his workpeople. The cottage itself, however, was
pleasant enough to look upon, half thatched and half slated, with a narrow
strip of flower-garden in front full of hollyhocks, sun-flowers, and wall-
flowers, enclosed in a high elder-hedge. Besides which, the occupier had a
prescriptive right, by custom, to a patch of potato ground in the allotments
about a mile up the road. And half-a-dozen damson-trees overshadowed the
back of the cottage, their branches coquetting with the roof when the wind
blew.
Here the bridal party made a hearty dinner, and grew jolly and genial
afterwards over several gallons of beer ordered from the "Good Woman"
inn: a sign which represented a woman minus a head, and therefore silent. It
was the end of the harvest, and Absalom had plenty of money in his pocket:
a week's holiday was therefore indispensable. The imbibing so much beer
left a taste in the mouth next morning: this must be washed away by a visit
to the barrel. Then there was a stroll to the top of a high hill in the
neighbourhood, and as it was very hot, the party was obliged to "wet their
whistles" and "wash the dust out of their throats" at every sign on the road,
there and back; always backed up with a second glass for the "good of the

house." The week wore on, and by Saturday Absalom had thoroughly
emancipated himself from the traces of control. Saturday evening brought a
company together at the "Good Woman," whom it behoved him to treat.
Gallon after gallon was disposed of; Absalom, as the hero of the evening,
rising higher and higher in his own estimation with every glass. At length a
rude jest led to a blow. Absalom had his coat off in an instant, and felled
Roaring Billy like an ox. A row began. The landlord, jealous of his license,
turned them all out into the road, when one or two, overcome by the fresh
air on top of so much liquor, quietly laid down in the dust. Absalom, mad
with drink and vanity, hit out right and left, and piled up three half-stupefied
fellows on top of each other, then, shouting—

"I'm the king of the castle!"

stood up in the middle of the road, and brandishing his arms, challenged all
comers.
At that moment a pair of ponies dashed round the corner and suddenly
stopped—obstructed by half-a-dozen men lying in the way. A tall
gentleman, with a very broad forehead, a very small nose, and a profusion
of grey beard, sprang out, and went up to the landlord, who stood at the
door.
"Johnson," said he sharply, "this is disgraceful. What's that fellow's name?"
pointing to Absalom.
The landlord of course didn't know—was very sorry.
"I can tell 'ee, zur," said a voice, almost a childish treble, and old Tim crept
out from whence he had been sipping up the forsaken goblets. "It be
Absalom White—it be."
"Very good," said the Reverend J. Horton, and resuming his seat, drove on;
while Absalom, shouting and staggering, marched down the road,
imagining he had carried all before him.
The Reverend J. Horton was the owner of the allotment grounds, which he
had broken up from the glebe land with the idea of benefiting the poor.
Every tenant received a circular of rules which were to be observed.

Foremost amongst these was a rule against fighting and drinking. Absalom
next week received an intimation that he must give up his allotment. He
swore, and said it didn't matter a "cuss," it was autumn, and the crop was
up, and he'd warrant he'd get another piece before spring somewhere. But
Madge cried, for her mother had prophesied evil from this offending of the
"gentle-folk." Absalom kissed her and went to his work.
Madge, despite these things, was happy enough. Her education had not
taught her to expect great things. She went forth to her work in the morning
with a light heart. Merry as a cricket, she forgot in the sunshine all the
ominous forebodings of her feeble old mother. It so chanced, however, that
Absalom's master could not find her employment at that season, and she
therefore worked on a farm at a little distance. Madge saw little of Absalom,
except at night, and then he was tired and went early to bed. Her restless
spirit could not be satisfied with so little companionship. Naturally fond of
admiration, she thought no harm of talking and joking with the men, and
her gossips encouraged her in it. The very same "gossips" reported her
freedom to Absalom—very much exaggerated. Absalom said nothing. He
was slow to understand any new idea. On her road home from her work
Madge had to come down a lane with but one solitary cottage in it. It
belonged to an itinerant tinker, his own property, only paying quit-rent of a
shilling a year. He was a bachelor, a gipsy sort of fellow, full of fun and
rollicksome mirth, better educated than the labourers, and with a store of
original ideas which he had acquired in travelling about. This fellow
—"Bellows," as he was called—admired Madge exceedingly, and had tried
to win her for himself, but failed. Still, what pretty woman was ever
displeased with the attentions of a smart young fellow? After her marriage
"Bellows" courted her more and more. It became a "talk," as the country
people call it. Madge, thinking her title as wife exonerated her from all
remarks, perhaps allowed him to go further than she ought, but, in strict
earnestness, meant no harm. These things came to Absalom's ears. He grew
fonder and fonder of the public-house. Still, at home he said nothing.
It grew to be winter. One cold, frosty, but beautiful moonlight night
Absalom came home late from his work. He had been sent up on the hills
with some sheep, and did not return till two hours after his usual time.
Weary and hungry, and not in the best of tempers, he walked in. The door
was ajar, and there were some embers on the hearth, but Madge was neither

in sight nor call. Eager for his supper, Absalom went out, and soon learned
that she had gone up to the "Good Woman." Madge indeed, finding he did
not come home, had gone up there to look for him. "Bellows" was there,
and the landlord and he had been drinking pretty freely. No sooner did
Madge come in than the landlord blew out the candle, slipped out, and
locked the door with a loud guffaw, leaving the pair alone in the dark.
Unable to escape, Madge sat down, and they chatted away gaily enough.
It was thus that Absalom found them. He said nothing when he learnt where
Madge was, but left the house and walked back to the cottage. Alarmed at
his sullen demeanour, the landlord unlocked the door. Madge flew back to
the cottage.
"Ab," said she, rushing in with an armful of sticks to make a blaze, "you'll
want your supper."
The reply was a blow which doubled her up in a corner senseless.
Absalom sat for a while sullenly glowering over the embers, and then went
to bed, leaving Madge sobbing on the bare, hard earthen floor. It was
midnight before she crept to his side.
Early in the morning Absalom got up and dressed. Madge was sleeping
soundly, a dark circle under each eye; she had cried herself to sleep. He
went out and left her.

CHAPTER III.
Six weeks passed, and Absalom did not return. Madge went over to her
mother. "He bean't come," she said, beginning to cry.
"I knowed a wassn't," said the old woman, rocking herself to and fro in her
low rush-bottomed chair, with her feet on the hearth, almost among the
ashes. "Thee's soon have to look out for theeself."
"How, mother?"
"Cos I'm going to die."
"Mother!"
"I be goin' to die," repeated the old woman in the same calm, hard tone. A
life of incessant labour had crushed all sentiment out of her—except
superstition—and she faced the hard facts of existence without emotion.
Madge began to weep.
"Thee go and shut up the cottage, wench, and come and bide wi' I."
Madge did so. In a few days the old woman took to her bed. She had it
dragged out of the next room—there was but one floor—and placed near
the fire, which was constantly kept up. Madge waited on her assiduously
when she was not out of doors at field-work. Work was growing scarcer and
scarcer as the winter advanced. The old woman slowly grew weaker and
weaker, till Madge could leave her no longer. So she stayed at home, and so
lost the little employment she had. One evening, when the firelight was
growing low and dark shadows were flickering over the ceiling, the old
woman seemed to recover a little strength, and sat up in bed.
"Madge!"
"Yes, mother."
"Thee must promise I one thing."

"What be it, mother?"
"As thee won't have I buried by the parish."
Madge began to cry.
"Dost thee hear?"
"I won't."
A long silence.
"Madge!"
"Yes, mother."
"Thee go to the fire. Dost thee see that brick in the chimbley as sticks out a
little way?"
"Yes."
"Pull it out."
Madge caught hold, and after a few tugs pulled the brick out.
"Put thee hand in!"
Madge thrust hand and arm into the cavity, and brought out a dirty stocking.
"Has thee got th' stocking?"
"Yes, mother."
"Bury I wi' wots in thur, and take care o' the rest on't. Thee's want it bad
enough afore th' spring comes."
Madge replaced the stocking without examining it. She was heavy at heart.
Before morning her mother was dead.
Madge went back to her own cottage, carrying with her just a sovereign in
sixpences and fourpenny-bits. She sat down and wept. No one came near
her. Her former gossips, always jealous of her beauty, left her alone with
her sorrow. But she knew that she could not remain idle. Something must be

done. So she went out to rick-work, but there was none to be had. From
farm to farm Madge wearily toiled along, meeting the same answer
everywhere—"Had got more on now than they could find work for." Madge
felt exceedingly ill as she slowly wended her way homewards. Then for the
first time she remembered that she must shortly become a mother.
In her weak state Madge caught cold. She shivered incessantly. The poor
child could not rise from her bed in the morning, her limbs were so stiff and
her head so bad. She lay there all day, crying to herself. Hunger at last,
towards evening, compelled her to get up and seek food. There was only a
piece of crust in the cupboard and a little lard. She was trying to masticate
these when there came a tap at the door. "Come in," said Madge. Farmer
Humphreys now appeared in the doorway. He was a short, thick man, with
a shock-head of yellow hair, small grey eyes, and lips almost blue.
"There be ten weeks' rent a-owing," said he, sitting down; "and we don't
mean to wait no longer. And there's a half-side o' bacon an' a load of
faggots."
"How much is it altogether?"
"Seventeen-and-six."
"I ain't a-got but a pound, and Absalom bean't come whoam."
"The vagabond—cuss 'im!"
"A bean't no vagabond," cried Madge, firing up in defence of her husband.
"Bist thee a-goin' to pay—or bisn't?" said the fellow, beginning to bully.
Madge counted him out the money, and he left, casting an ugly leer on her
as he went.
Half-a-crown remained. On that half-crown Madge lived for one whole
month. The cold clung to her and grew worse. Her tongue burned and her
limbs shook; it was fever as well as cold—that low aguish fever, the curse
of the poor. Bread and lard day by day, bread and lard, and a little weak tea.
And at the month's end the half-crown was gone: sixpence went for her last
half-dozen faggots. Madge crawled upstairs and wrapped herself up in a
blanket, sitting on the side of the bed. It was her miserable loneliness which

troubled the poor child most. Her cough, and the cold, and want of food and
firing, might have been borne had there been some one to talk to. But alone
they did their work. Her form was dreadfully shrunken, her hands as thin
and bony as those her old mother last stretched over the fire. The ale-house
which had absorbed her husband's earnings sent her no aid in this time of
distress, and he had offended the clergyman who would otherwise have
found her out. It grew dusky, as the poor creature sat on the edge of the bed.
Suddenly there was a hand on the latch of the door downstairs. Madge
trembled with eagerness as a heavy step sounded on the floor—could it be
Absalom? Her black eyes, looking larger from the paleness of her sunken
cheeks, began to blaze with a new light. The steps came to the foot of the
stairs and began ascending. She listened eagerly. A head of yellow hair
came up through the trap-door, and the small grey eyes of young
Humphreys leered on her. Disappointed and amazed, Madge remained
silent. Humphreys came up and sat on the bed beside her.
"Thee's got thin," he said, with a sort of chuckle. "Like some grub, wouldn't
ye?"
No answer. He put his hand on her shoulder and muttered something in her
ear. Madge seemed scarcely to understand him, but sat staring wildly.
"I'll give thee sixpence," said Humphreys, showing one.
Then a full sense of his dishonourable intentions, mingled with shame and
disgust at his unutterable meanness, came over Madge, and rising with a
flush on her cheek, she struck him with all her might. It was a feeble blow,
but he was unprepared: it over-balanced him; he staggered backwards, and
fell heavily down the stairs. Madge, her heart beating painfully fast, leaned
back on the bed and listened. There was not a sound. A dreadful thought
that he might be killed flashed across her mind. Her impulse was to go
down and see, but her strength failed, and she sat down again and waited. It
seemed hours before she heard him stir and, after a noise like a great dog
shaking himself, with mingled curses and threats, leave the house. Then a
great pain came over her. She felt as if she should die, but the greatest dread
was the dread of loneliness. She staggered to the window and looked out. A
boy was passing, and she told him to go to Mrs. Green's and send her down.

Then she fell on the bed in a faint, with the window open and the cold,
bitter, biting east wind blowing in.
It was half a mile to Mrs. Green's—one of Madge's old gossips. The boy got
there in two hours. Mrs. Green was putting her baby to bed, but instantly
transferred that duty to her eldest girl, and went off eager for news.
At nine that night the "Good Woman" inn resounded with talk of Madge.
Not a bit nor a drop was there in the house, according to Mrs. Green. The
landlord said Absalom owed him two shillings unpaid score: he could
forgive her the debt, but he couldn't give nothing. Mrs. Green went home
for her supper, and returning, found Madge conscious. She would not have
the parish doctor.
"Bellows," the tinker, had during these late months been out on an itinerant
journey. He came home that night, and at the "Good Woman" heard the
news. His quick wit put him up to a plan to serve the poor girl. Early in the
morning he took his pack and went through the village up to the Rev. Mr.
Horton's. There, under pretence of asking for kettles to mend, he told the
most dismal tale to the housemaid. At breakfast-time this was reported to
Mrs. Horton. Distress at such a time was sufficient to engage any lady's
attention. Mrs. Horton was a frail, tender woman, but earnest in works of
charity. The ponies were ordered, and down they drove. The tale was not
overdrawn. "Not a crust in the cupboard—not a stick to light a fire: the poor
creature starved, and—and—you know, coming," said the good lady
afterwards, describing the scene. "John drove after the doctor instantly, and
I stayed. Poor girl! It was still-born; and she, poor thing! we saw, could not
live long."
Madge, indeed, died the same night, totally worn out at nineteen.

And Absalom? He had gone to work on a distant railway as a navvy, and,
earning good wages and able to enjoy himself nightly at the taverns, forgot
poor Madge. Months went on. News travels slowly among the poor, but at
last intelligence did reach him that his mother was dead and Madge

starving. To do him justice, he had never thought of that, and he started at
once for home, travelling on foot. But passing through a village with his
bundle on his shoulders, he was arrested by a policeman who observed
some blood on it. It was on the slop he had worn in the fight at the "Good
Woman," and came only from the nose. But there had been a brutal murder
in the neighbourhood, the public mind was excited, and Absalom was
remanded for inquiries. It took a fortnight to prove his identity, and by then
Madge was dead.
Absalom went back to the railway and drank harder than ever. It was
observed that he drank now by himself and for drinking's sake, whereas
before he had only been fond of liquor with company. After a year he found
his way back home. Madge was forgotten, and he easily got work. Likely
young men are not so common on farms: strict inquiries are rarely made.
The last that was heard of him appeared in the local newspaper:—
"Drunk and Disorderly.—Absalom White was brought up in custody,
charged with obstructing the road while in a state of intoxication. Fined five
shillings and seven-and-six costs."

PART II.

THE COMING OF SUMMER.
The June sky is of the deepest blue when seen above the fresh foliage of the
oaks in the morning before the sun has filled the heavens with his meridian
light. To see the blue at its best it needs something to form a screen so that
the azure may strike the eye with its fulness undiminished by its own
beauty; for if you look at the open sky such a breadth of the same hue tones
itself down. But let the eye rise upwards along a wall of oak spray, then at
the rim the rich blue is thick, quite thick, opaque, and steeped in luscious
colour. Unless, indeed, upon the high downs,—there the June sky is too
deep even for the brilliance of the light, and requires no more screen than
the hand put up to shade the eyes. These level plains by the Thames are
different, and here I like to see the sky behind and over an oak.
About Surbiton the oaks come out into leaf earlier than in many places; this
spring[2] there were oak-leaves appearing on April 24, yet so backward are
some of them that, while all the rest were green, there were two in the
hedge of a field by the Ewell road still dark within ten days of June. They
looked dark because their trunks and boughs were leafless against a
background of hawthorn, elm, and other trees in full foliage, the clover
flowering under them, and May bloom on the hedge. They were black as
winter, and even now, on the 1st of June, the leaves are not fully formed.
The trees flowered in great perfection this spring; many oaks were covered
with their green pendants, and they hung from the sycamores. Except the
chestnuts, whose bloom can hardly be overlooked, the flowering of the trees
is but little noticed; the elm is one of the earliest, and becomes ruddy—it is
as early as the catkins on the hazel; willow, aspen, oak, sycamore, ash, all
have flower or catkin—even the pine, whose fructification is very
interesting. The pines or Scotch firs by the Long Ditton road hang their
sweeping branches to the verge of the footpath, and the new cones, the
sulphur farina, and the fresh shoots are easily seen. The very earliest oak to
put forth its flowers is in a garden on Oak Hill; it is green with them, while
yet the bitter winds have left a sense of winter in the air.

There is a broad streak of bright-yellow charlock—in the open arable field
beyond the Common. It lights up the level landscape; the glance falls on it
immediately. Field beans are in flower, and their scent comes sweet even
through the dust of the Derby Day. Red heads of trifolium dot the ground;
the vetches have long since been out, and are so still; along the hedges
parsley forms a white fringe. The charlock seems late this year; it is
generally up well before June—the first flowers by the roadside or rickyard,
in a waste dry corner. Such dry waste places send up plants to flower, such
as charlock and poppy, quicker than happens in better soil, but they do not
reach nearly the height or size. The field beans are short from lack of rain;
there are some reeds in the ditch by them, and these too are short; they have
not half shot up yet, for the same reason. On the sward by the Long Ditton
road the goat's-beard is up; it grows to some size there every season, but is
not very common elsewhere. It is said to close its sepals at noon, and was
therefore called "Jack-go-to-bed-at-noon," but in fact it shuts much earlier,
and often does not open at all, and you may pass twenty times and not see it
open. Its head is like that of the dandelion, and children blow it to see
what's o'clock in the same way. It forms a large ball, and browner;
dandelion seed-balls are white. The grass is dotted with them now; they
give a glossy, silky appearance to the meadows. Tiny pink geranium flowers
show on bunches of dusty grass; silver weed lays its yellow buttercup-like
flower on the ground, placing it in the angle of the road and the sward,
where the sward makes a ridge. Cockspur grass—three claws and a spur
like a cock's foot—is already whitened with pollen; already in comparison,
for the grasses are late to lift their heads this summer. As the petals of the
May fall the young leaves appear, small and green, to gradually enlarge
through the hay-time.
A slight movement of the leaves on a branch of birch shows that something
living is there, and presently the little head and neck of a whitethroat peers
over them, and then under, looking above and beneath each leaf, and then
with a noiseless motion passing on to the next. Another whitethroat follows
immediately, and there is not a leaf forgotten nor a creeping thing that can
hide from them. Every tree and every bush is visited by these birds, and
others of the insect-feeders; the whole summer's day they are searching, and
the caterpillar, as it comes down on a thread, slipping from the upper
branches, only drops into their beaks. Birds, too, that at other periods feed

on grain and seed, now live themselves, and bring up their young, upon
insects.
I went to look over a gate to see how the corn was rising—it is so short,
now in June, that it will not hide a hare—and on coming near there was a
cock chaffinch perched on the top, a fine bird in full colour. He did not
move though I was now within three yards, nor till I could have almost
touched him did he fly; he had a large caterpillar in his beak, and no doubt
his nest or the young from it were in the hedge. In feeding the young birds
the old ones always perch first at a short distance, and after waiting a
minute proceed to their fledgelings. Should a blackbird come at full speed
across the meadow and stay on a hedge-top, and then go down into the
mound, it is certain that his nest is there. If a thrush frequents a tree, flying
up into the branches for a minute and then descending into the underwood,
most likely the young thrushes are there.
Little indeed do the birds care for appropriate surroundings; anything does
for them, they do not aim at effect. I heard a tit-lark singing his loudest, and
found him perched on the edge of a tub, formed of a barrel sawn in two,
placed in the field for the horses to drink from, as there was no pond. Some
swallows are very fond of a notice-board fastened to a pole beside the
Hogsmill bank. Upon its upper edge they perch and twitter sweetly. There is
a muddy pond by Tolworth Farm, near the road; it is muddy because a herd
of cows drink from and stand in it, stirring up the bottom. An elm
overhangs it, and the lower boughs are dead and leafless. On these there are
always swallows twittering over the water. Grey and yellow wagtails run
along the verge. In the morning the flock of goslings who began to swim in
the pond, now grown large and grey, arrange themselves in a double row,
some twenty or thirty of them, in loose order, tuck their bills under their
wings and sleep. Two old birds stand in the rear as if in command of the
detachment. A sow, plastered with mud like the rhinoceri in the African
lakes, lies on the edge of the brown water, so nearly the hue of the water
and the mire, and so exactly at their juncture, as to be easily overlooked.
But the sweet summer swallows sing on the branches; they do not see the
wallowing animal, they see only the sunshine and the summer, golden
buttercups and blue sky.

In the hollow at Long Ditton I had the delight, a day or two since, to see a
kingfisher. There is a quiet lane, and at the bottom, in a valley, two ponds,
one in enclosed grounds, the other in a meadow opposite. Standing there a
minute to see if there was a martin among the birds with which the pond in
the grounds is thickly covered, something came shooting straight towards
me, and swerving only a yard or two to pass me, a kingfisher went by. His
blue wings, his ruddy front, the white streak beside his neck, and long bill,
were all visible for a moment; then he was away straight over the meadow,
the directness of his course enabling it to be followed for some time till he
cleared the distant hedge, probably going to visit his nest. Kingfishers,
though living by the stream, often build a good way from water. The
months have lengthened into years since I saw one here before, sitting on
the trunk of a willow which bends over the pond in the mead. The tree rises
out of the water and is partly in it; it is hung with moss, and the kingfisher
was on the trunk within a foot or so of the surface. After that there came
severe winters, and till now I did not see another here. So that the bird came
upon me unexpectedly out from the shadow of the trees that overhang the
water, past me, and on into the sunshine over the buttercups and sorrel of
the field.
This hollow at Long Ditton is the very place of singing birds; never was
such a place for singing—the valley is full of music. In the oaks blackbirds
whistle. You do not often see them; they are concealed by the thick foliage
up on high, for they seek the top branches, which are more leafy; but once
now and then they quietly flutter across to another perch. The blackbird's
whistle is very human, like a human being playing the flute; an uncertain
player, now drawing forth a bar of a beautiful melody and then losing it
again. He does not know what quiver or what turn his note will take before
it ends; the note leads him and completes itself. It is a song which strives to
express the singer's keen delight, the singer's exquisite appreciation of the
loveliness of the days; the golden glory of the meadow, the light, the
luxurious shadows, the indolent clouds reclining on their azure couch. Such
thoughts can only be expressed in fragments, like a sculptor's chips thrown
off as the inspiration seizes him, not mechanically sawn to a set line. Now
and again the blackbird feels the beauty of the time, the large white daisy
stars, the grass with yellow-dusted tips, the air which comes so softly
unperceived by any precedent rustle of the hedge, the water which runs

slower, held awhile by rootlet, flag, and forget-me-not. He feels the beauty
of the time and he must say it. His notes come like wild flowers, not sown
in order. The sunshine opens and shuts the stops of his instrument. There is
not an oak without a blackbird, and there are others afar off in the hedges.
The thrushes sing louder here than anywhere; they really seem to have
louder notes; they are all round. Thrushes appear to vary their songs with
the period of the year; they sing loudly now, but more plaintively and
delicately in the autumn. Warblers and willow wrens sing out of sight
among the trees; they are easily hidden by a leaf; ivy-leaves are so smooth,
with an enamelled surface, that high up, as the wind moves them, they
reflect the sunlight and scintillate. Greenfinches in the elms never cease
love-making, and love-making needs much soft talking. There is a
nightingale in a bush by the lane which sings so loud the hawthorn seems to
shake with the vigour of his song; too loud, though a nightingale, if you
stand at the verge of the boughs, as he would let you without alarm; farther
away it becomes sweet and softer. Yellowhammers call from the trees up
towards the arable fields. There are but a few of them: it is the place of
singing birds.
The doves in the copse are nearer the house this year; I see them more often
in the field at the end of the garden. As the dove rises the white fringe on
the tip of the tail becomes visible, especially when flying up into a tree. One
afternoon one flew up into a hornbeam close to the garden, beside it in fact,
and perched there full in view, not twenty yards at farthest. At first he sat
upright, raising his neck and watching us in the garden; then, in a minute or
so, turned and fluttered down to his nest. The wood-pigeons are more quiet
now; their whoo-hoo-ing is not so frequently heard. By the sounds up in the
elms at the top of the Brighton road (at the end of Langley Lane) the young
rooks have not yet all flown, though it is the end of the first week in June.
There is a little pond near the rookeries, and by it a row of elms. From one
of these a heavy bough has just fallen without the least apparent cause.
There is no sign of lightning, nor does it even look decayed; the wood has
fractured short off; it came down with such force that the ends of the lesser
branches are broken and turned up, though, as it was the lowest limb, it had
not far to fall, showing the weight of the timber. There has been no
hurricane of wind, nothing at all to cause it, yet this thick bough snapped.
No other tree is subject to these dangerous falls of immense limbs, without

warning or apparent cause, so that it is not safe to rest under elms. An
accident might not occur once in ten years; nevertheless the risk is there.
Elms topple over before gales which scarcely affect other trees, or only tear
off a few twigs. Two have thus been thrown recently—within eighteen
months—in the fields opposite Tolworth Farm. The elm drags up its own
roots, which are often only a fringe round its butt, and leaves a hollow in
the earth, as if it had been simply stood on end and held by these guy-ropes.
Other trees do, indeed, fall in course of time, but not till they are obviously
on the point of tottering, but the elm goes down in full pride of foliage. By
this pond there is a rough old oak, which is the peculiar home of some
titmice; they were there every day, far back on the frost and snow, and their
sharp notes sounded like some one chipping the ice on the horse-pond with
an iron instrument. Probably, before now, they have had a nest in a crevice.
The tallest grass yet to be seen is in a little orchard on the right-hand side of
the Long Ditton road. This little orchard is a favourite spot of mine,
meaning, of course, to look at: it is a natural orchard and left to itself. The
palings by the road are falling, and held up chiefly by the brambles and the
ivy that has climbed up them. There are trees on the left and trees on the
right; a fine spruce fir at the back. The apple-trees are not set in straight
lines; they were at first, but some have died away and left an irregularity.
The trees themselves lean this way and that; they are scarred and marked, as
it were, with lichen and moss. It is the home of birds. A blackbird had a nest
this spring in the bushes on the left side, a nightingale in the bushes on the
right side, and there he sang and sang for hours every morning. A sharp,
relentless shrike lives in one of the trees close by, and is perpetually darting
across the road upon insects on the sward among the fern there. There are
several thrushes who reside in this orchard besides the lesser birds.
Swallows sometimes twitter from the tops of the apple-trees. As the grass is
so safe from intrusion, one of the earliest buttercups flowers here. The
apple-bloom appears rosy on the bare boughs only lately scourged by the
east wind. After a time the trees are in full bloom, set about into the green
of the hedges and bushes and the dark spruce behind. Bennets, the flower of
the grass, come up. The first bennet is to green things what a swallow is to
the breathing creatures of summer. White horse-chestnut blooms stand up in
their stately way, lighting the path, which is strewn with fallen oak-flower.
May appears on the hawthorn: there is an early bush of it. Now the grass is

so high the flowers are lost under it; even the buttercups are overtopped;
and soon as the young apples take form and shape white bramble-bloom
will cover the bushes by the palings. Acorns will show on the oaks: the
berries will ripen from red to black beneath. Along the edge of the path,
where the dandelions and plantains are thick with seed, the greenfinches
will come down and select those they like best: this they often do by the
footpath beside the road. Lastly, the apples become red; the beech in the
corner has an orange spray, and cones hang long and brown upon the
spruce. The thrushes after silence sing again, and autumn approaches. But,
pass when you may, this little orchard has always something, because it is
left to itself—I had written neglected. I struck the word out, for this is not
neglect, this is true attention, to leave it to itself, so that the young trees trail
over the bushes and stay till the berries fall of their own over-ripeness, if
perchance spared by the birds; so that the dead brown leaves lie and are not
swept away unless the wind pleases; so that all things follow their own
course and bent. Almost opposite, by autumn, when the reapers are busy
with the sheaves, the hedge is white with the large trumpet-flowers of the
greater convolvulus. The hedgerow seems made of convolvulus then,
nothing but convolvulus; nowhere else does the flower flourish so strongly,
and the bines remain till the following spring. This little orchard, without a
path through it, without a border, or a parterre, or a terrace, is a place to sit
down and dream in, notwithstanding that it touches the road, for thus left to
itself it has acquired an atmosphere of peace and stillness such as belongs to
and grows up in woods and far-away coombs of the hills. A stray passer-by
would go on without even noticing it, it is so commonplace and
unpretentious, merely a corner of meadow irregularly dotted with apple-
trees; a place that needs frequent glances and a dreamy mood to understand
as the birds understand it. They are always here, even in the winter,
starlings and blackbirds particularly, who resort to a kind of furrow there,
which, even in frost, seems to afford them some food. In the spring thrushes
move along, rustling the fallen leaves as they search behind the arum-
sheaths unrolling beside the palings, or under the shelter of the group of
trees where arum-roots are plentiful. There are nooks and corners from
which shy creatures can steal out from the shadow and be happy. The dew
falls softly, more noiseless than snow, and a star shines to the north over the
spruce fir. By day there is a loving streak of sunshine somewhere among the
tree-trunks; by night a star above. The trees are nothing to speak of in size

or height, but they seem always to bloom well and to be fruitful; tree-
climbers run up these and then go off to the elms.
Beside the Long Ditton road, up the gentle incline on the left side, the broad
sward is broken by thickets and brake like those of a forest. If a forest were
cleared, as those in America are swept away before the axe, but a line of
underwood left beside the highway, the result would be much the same as
may be seen here when the bushes and fern are in perfection. Thick
hawthorn bushes stand at unequal distances surrounded with brake; one
with a young oak in the centre. Fern extends from one thicket to the other,
and brambles fence the thorns, which are themselves well around. From
such coverts the boar was started in old English days, the fawns hide behind
and about them even now in many a fair park, and where there are no deer
they are frequented by hares. So near the dust which settles on them as the
wheels raise it, of course, every dog that passes runs through, and no game
could stay an hour, but they are the exact kind of cover game like. One
morning this spring, indeed, I noticed a cock-pheasant calmly walking
along the ridge of a furrow in the ploughed field, parted from these bushes
by the hedge. He was so near the highway that I could see the ring about his
neck. I have seen peewits or green plovers in the same field, which is now
about to be built on. But though no game could stay an hour in such places,
lesser birds love them, white-throats build there, gold-crests come down
from the dark pines opposite—they seem fond of pines—yellow-hammers
sit and sing on them, and they are visited all day long by one or other. The
little yellow flowers of tormentil are common in the grass as autumn
approaches, and grasshoppers, which do not seem plentiful here, sing there.
Some betony flowers are opposite on the other sward. There is a marshy
spot by one of the bushes where among the rushes various semi-aquatic
grasses grow. Blackberries are thick in favourable seasons—like all fruit,
they are an uncertain crop; and hawkweeds are there everywhere on the
sward towards the edge. The peculiar green of fern, which is more of a
relief to the eye than any other shrub with which I am acquainted, so much
so that I wonder it is not more imitated, is remarkable here when the
burning July sun shines on the white dust thus fringed. By then trees are
gone off in colour, the hedges are tired with heat, but the fern is a soft green
which holds the glance. This varies much with various seasons; this year the
fern is particularly late from a lack of moisture, but sometimes it is really

beautiful between these bushes. It is cut down in its full growth by those
who have charge of the road, and the scene is entirely destroyed for the
remainder of the season; it is not often that such bushes and such fern are
found beside the highway, and, if not any annoyance to the residents, are
quite as worthy of preservation (not "preservation" by beadle) as open
spaces like commons. Children, and many of larger growth, revel about
them, gathering the flowers in spring and summer, the grasses and the
blackberries in autumn. It is but a strip of sward, but it is as wild as if in the
midst of a forest. A pleasure to every one—therefore destroy it.
In the evening from the rise of the road here I sometimes hear the cry of a
barn owl skirting the hedge of Southborough Park, and disappearing under
the shadow of the elms that stand there. The stars appear and the whole
dome of the summer night is visible, for in a level plain like this a slight
elevation brings the horizon into view. Without moon the June nights are
white; a faint white light shows through the trees of Southborough Park
northwards; the west has not lost all its tint over the Ditton hollow; white
flowers stand in the grass; white road, white flint-heaps even, white clouds,
and the stars, too, light without colour.
By day the breeze comes south and west, free over fields, over corn and
grass and hedgerow; so slight a mound as this mere rise in the river-side
plain lifts you up into the current of the air. Where the wind comes the
sunlight is purer.
The sorrel is now high and ripening in the little meadows beside the road
just beyond the orchard. As it ripens the meadow becomes red, for the stalks
rise above the grass. This is the beginning of the feast of seeds. The sorrel
ripens just as the fledgelings are leaving the nest; if you watch the meadow
a minute you will see the birds go out to it, now flying up a moment and
then settling again. After a while comes the feast of grain; then another feast
of seeds among the stubble, and the ample fields, and the furze of the hills;
then berries, and then winter, and the last seed.
A June rose. Something caught my eye on the top of the high hawthorn
hedge beside the Brighton road one evening as it was growing dusk, and on
looking again there was a spray of briar in flower, two roses in full bloom
and out of reach, and one spray of three growing buds. So it is ever with the

June rose. It is found unexpectedly, and when you are not looking for it. It
is a gift, not a discovery, or anything earned—a gift like love and happiness.
With ripening grasses the rose comes, and the rose is summer: till then it is
spring. On the green banks—waste places—beside the "New Road"
(Kingsdown Road formerly) the streaked pink convolvulus is in flower; a
sign that the spring forces have spent themselves, that the sun is near his
fulness. The flower itself is shapely, yet it is not quite welcome; it says too
plainly that we are near the meridian. There are months of warmth to follow
—brilliant sunshine and new beauties; but the freshness, the joyous looking
forward of spring is gone. Upon these banks the first coltsfoot flowers in
March, the first convolvulus in summer, and almost the last hawkweed in
autumn. A yellow vetchling, too, is now opening its yellow petals beside the
Long Ditton road: another summer flower, which comes in as the blue
veronica is leaving the sward.
As tall as the young corn the mayweed fringes the arable fields with its
white rays and yellow centre, somewhat as the broad moon-daisies stand in
the grass. By this time generally the corn is high above the mayweed, but
this year the flower is level with its shelter. The pale corn buttercup is in
flower by the New Road, not in the least overshadowed by the crops at the
edge of which it grows. By the stream through Tolworth Common spotted
persicaria is rising thickly, but even this strong-growing plant is backward
and checked on the verge of the shrunken stream. The showers that have
since fallen have not made up for the lack of the April rains, which in the
most literal sense cause the flowers of May and June. Without those early
spring rains the wild flowers cannot push their roots and develop their
stalks in time for the summer sun. The sunshine and heat finds them
unprepared. In the ditches the square-stemmed figwort is conspicuous by its
dark green. It is very plentiful about Surbiton. Just outside the garden in a
waste corner the yellow flowers of celandine are overhung by wild hops
and white bryony, two strong plants of which have climbed up the copse
hedge, twining in and out each other. Both have vine-like leaves; but the
hops are wrinkled, those of the bryony hairy or rough to the touch. The hops
seem to be the most powerful, and hold the bryony in the background. The
young spruce firs which the wood-pigeon visited in the spring with an idea
of building there look larger and thicker now the fresh green needles have
appeared.

In the woodland lane to Claygate the great elder-bushes are coming into
flower, each petal a creamy-white. The dogwood, too, is opening, and the
wild guelder-roses there are in full bloom. There is a stile from which a path
leads across the fields thence to Hook. The field by the stile was fed off in
spring, and now is yellow with birdsfoot lotus, which tints it because the
grass is so short. From the grass at every footstep a crowd of little
"hoppers" leap in every direction, scattering themselves hastily abroad. The
little mead by the copse here is more open to the view this year, as the dry
winter has checked the growth of ferns and rushes. There is a flock of
missel-thrushes in it: the old birds feed the young, who can fly well in the
centre of the field. Lesser birds come over from the hedges to the bunches
of rushes. Slowly wandering along the lane and looking over the mound on
the right hand (cow-wheat with yellow lip is in flower on the mound), there
are glimpses between the bushes and the Spanish chestnut-trees of far-away
blue hills—blue under the summer sky.

FOOTNOTE:

[2] 1881.

THE GOLDEN-CRESTED WREN.
This lovely little bird is so small and light that it can cling suspended on the
end of a single narrow leaf, or needle of pine, and it does not depress the
least branch on which it may alight. The gold-crest frequents the loneliest
heath, the deepest pine wood, and the immediate neighbourhood of
dwellings indifferently. A Scotch fir or pine grew so near a house in which I
once lived that the boughs almost brushed the window, and when confined
to my room by illness, it gave me much pleasure to watch a pair of these
wrens who frequently visited the tree. They are also fond of thick thorn
hedges, and, like all birds, have their favourite localities, so that if you see
them once or twice in one place you should mark the tree or bush, for there
they are almost certain to return. It would be quite possible for a person to
pass several years in the country and never see one of these birds. There is a
trick in finding birds' nests, and a trick in seeing birds. The first I noticed
was in an orchard; soon after, I found a second in a yew-tree (close to a
window), and after that constantly came upon them as they crept through
brambles or in hedgerows, or a mere speck up in a fir-tree. So soon as I had
seen one I saw plenty.

AN EXTINCT RACE.
There is something very mournful in a deserted house, and the feeling is
still further intensified if it happens to have once been a school, where a
minor world played out its little drama, and left its history written on the
walls. For a great boys' school is like a kingdom with its monarchs, its
ministers, and executioners, and even its changes of dynasty. Such a house
stood no long while since on the northern border-land of Wilts and Berks, a
mansion in its origin back in the days of Charles II., and not utterly
unconnected with the great events of those times, but which, for hard on a
hundred years—from the middle of the eighteenth to the middle of the
nineteenth century—was used as a superior grammar-school, or college, as
it would now be called. Gradually falling in reputation, and supplanted by
modern rivals for fifteen or twenty years, the huge hollow halls and endless
dormitories were silent, and the storms that sway with savage force down
from the hills wreaked their will upon the windows and the rotting roof.
Inside the refectory—the windows being blown in—and over the antique-
carved mantelpiece, two swallows' nests had been built to the ceiling or
cornice. The whitewashed walls were yellow and green with damp, and
covered with patches of saltpetre efflorescence. But they still bore, legible
and plain, the hasty inscriptions scrawled on them, years and years before,
by hands then young, but by now returned to dust. The history of this little
kingdom, the hopes and joys, the fears and hatreds of the subjects, still
remained, and might be gathered from these writings on the walls, just as
are the history of Egypt and of Assyria now deciphered from the palaces
and tombs. Here were the names of the kings—the head-masters—generally
with some rough doggerel verse, not often very flattering, and illustrated
with outline portraits. Here were caricatures of the ushers and tutors, hidden
in some corner of the dormitories once, no doubt, concealed by the
furniture, coupled with the very freest personalities, mostly in pencil, but
often done with a burnt stick. Dates were scattered everywhere—not often
the year, but the day of the month, doubtless memorable from some
expedition or lark played off half a century since. Now and then there was a
quotation from the classics—one describing the groaning and shouting of

the dying Hercules, till the rocks and the sad hills resounded, which
irresistibly suggested the idea of a thorough caning. Other inscriptions were
a mixture of Latin and any English words that happened to rhyme, together
producing the most extraordinary jumble. Where now are the merry hearts
that traced these lines upon the plaster in an idle mood? Attached to the
mansion was a great garden, or rather wilderness, with yew hedges ten feet
high and almost as thick, a splendid filbert walk, an orchard, with a sun-
dial. It is all—mansion and garden, noble yew-tree hedges and filbert walk,
sun-dial and all—swept away now. The very plaster upon which generation
after generation of boys recorded their history has been torn down, and has
crumbled into dust. Greater kingdoms than this have disappeared since the
world began, leaving not a sign even of their former existence.

ORCHIS MASCULA.
The Orchis mascula grew in the brook corner, and in early spring sent up a
tall spike of purple flowers. This plant stood alone in an angle of the brook
and a hedge, within sound of water ceaselessly falling over a dam. In those
days it had an aspect of enchantment to me; not only on account of its
singular appearance, so different from other flowers, but because in old
folios I had read that it could call up the passion of love. There was
something in the root beneath the sward which could make a heart beat
faster. The common modern books—I call them common of malice
prepense—were silent on these things. Their dry and formal knowledge was
without interest, mere lists of petals and pistils, a dried herbarium of plants
that fell to pieces at the touch of the fingers. Only by chipping away at hard
old Latin, contracted and dogged in more senses than one, and by gathering
together scattered passages in classic authors, could anything be learned.
Then there arose another difficulty, how to identify the magic plants? The
same description will very nearly fit several flowers, especially when not
actually in flower; how determine which really was the true root? The
uncertainty and speculation kept up the pleasure, till at last I should not
have cared to have had the original question answered. With my gun under
my arm I used to look at the orchis from time to time, so long as the spotted
leaves were visible, till the grass grew too long.

THE LIONS IN TRAFALGAR SQUARE.
The lions in Trafalgar Square are to me the centre of London. By those lions
began my London work; from them, as spokes from the middle of a wheel,
radiate my London thoughts. Standing by them and looking south you have
in front the Houses of Parliament, where resides the mastership of England;
at your back is the National Gallery—that is art; and farther back the British
Museum—books. To the right lies the wealth and luxury of the West End; to
the left the roar and labour, the craft and gold, of the City. For themselves,
they are the only monument in this vast capital worthy of a second visit as a
monument. Over the entire area covered by the metropolis there does not
exist another work of art in the open air. There are many structures and
things, no other art. The outlines of the great animals, the bold curves and
firm touches of the master hand, the deep indents, as it were, of his thumb
on the plastic metal, all the technique and grasp written there, is legible at a
glance. Then comes the pose and expression of the whole, the calm strength
in repose, the indifference to little things, the resolute view of great ones.
Lastly, the soul of the maker, the spirit which was taken from nature, abides
in the massive bronze. These lions are finer than those that crouch in the
cages at the Zoological Gardens; these are truer and more real, and, besides,
these are lions to whom has been added the heart of a man. Nothing
disfigures them; smoke and, what is much worse, black rain—rain which
washes the atmosphere of the suspended mud—does not affect them in the
least. If the choke-damp of fog obscures them, it leaves no stain on the
design; if the surfaces be stained, the idea made tangible in metal is not.
They are no more touched than Time itself by the alternations of the
seasons. The only noble open-air work of native art in the four-million city,
they rest there supreme and are the centre. Did such a work exist now in
Venice, what immense folios would be issued about it! All the language of
the studios would be huddled together in piled-up and running-over
laudation, and curses on our insular swine-eyes that could not see it. I have
not been to Venice, therefore I do not pretend to a knowledge of that
mediæval potsherd; this I do know, that in all the endless pictures on the
walls of the galleries in London, year after year exposed and disappearing

like snow somewhere unseen, never has there appeared one with such a
subject as this. Weak, feeble, mosaic, gimcrack, coloured tiles, and far-
fetched compound monsters, artificial as the graining on a deal front door,
they cannot be compared; it is the gingerbread gilt on a circus car to the
column of a Greek temple. This is pure open air, grand as Nature herself,
because it is Nature with, as I say, the heart of a man added.
But if any one desire the meretricious painting of warm light and cool yet
not hard shade, the effect of colour, with the twitching of triangles, the
spangles glittering, and all the arrangement contrived to take the eye, then
he can have it here as well as noble sculpture. Ascend the steps to the
National Gallery, and stand looking over the balustrade down across the
square in summer hours. Let the sun have sloped enough to throw a slant of
shadow outward; let the fountains splash whose bubbles restless speak of
rest and leisure, idle and dreamy; let the blue-tinted pigeons nod their heads
walking, and anon crowd through the air to the roof-tops. Shadow upon the
one side, bright light upon the other, azure above and swallows. Ever
rolling the human stream flows, mostly on the south side yonder, near
enough to be audible, but toned to bearableness. A stream of human hearts,
every atom a living mind filled with what thoughts?—a stream that ran
through Rome once, but has altered its course and wears away the banks
here now and triturates its own atoms, the hearts, to dust in the process.
Yellow omnibuses and red cabs, dark shining carriages, chestnut horses, all
rushing, and by their motion mixing their colours so that the commonness
of it disappears and the hues remain, a streak drawn in the groove of the
street—dashed hastily with thick camel's hair. In the midst the calm lions,
dusky, unmoved, full always of the one grand idea that was infused into
them. So full of it that the golden sun and the bright wall of the eastern
houses, the shade that is slipping towards them, the sweet swallows and the
azure sky, all the human stream holds of wealth and power and coroneted
panels—nature, man, and city—pass as naught. Mind is stronger than
matter. The soul alone stands when the sun sinks, when the shade is
universal night, when the van's wheels are silent and the dust rises no more.
At summer noontide, when the day surrounds us and it is bright light even
in the shadow, I like to stand by one of the lions and yield to the old feeling.
The sunshine glows on the dusky creature, as it seems, not on the surface,
but under the skin, as if it came up from out of the limb. The roar of the

rolling wheels sinks and becomes distant as the sound of a waterfall when
dreams are coming. All the abundant human life is smoothed and levelled,
the abruptness of the individuals lost in the flowing current, like separate
flowers drawn along in a border, like music heard so far off that the notes
are molten and the theme only remains. The abyss of the sky over and the
ancient sun are near. They only are close at hand, they and immortal
thought. When the yellow Syrian lions stood in old time of Egypt, then too,
the sunlight gleamed on the eyes of men, as now this hour on mine. The
same consciousness of light, the same sun, but the eyes that saw it and
mine, how far apart! The immense lion here beside me expresses larger
nature—cosmos—the ever-existent thought which sustains the world.
Massiveness exalts the mind till the vast roads of space which the sun
tramples are as an arm's-length. Such a moment cannot endure long;
gradually the roar deepens, the current resolves into individuals, the houses
return—it is only a square.
But a square potent. For London is the only real place in the world. The
cities turn towards London as young partridges run to their mother. The
cities know that they are not real. They are only houses and wharves, and
bricks and stucco; only outside. The minds of all men in them, merchants,
artists, thinkers, are bent on London. Thither they go as soon as they can.
San Francisco thinks London; so does St. Petersburg.
Men amuse themselves in Paris; they work in London. Gold is made
abroad, but London has a hook and line on every napoleon and dollar,
pulling the round discs hither. A house is not a dwelling if a man's heart be
elsewhere. Now, the heart of the world is in London, and the cities with the
simulacrum of man in them are empty. They are moving images only; stand
here and you are real.

THE END.

Printed by Ballantyne, Hanson & Co.
Edinburgh & London

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