22 My Little Farm 



men's work was, not to mention the assistance of 

 the women ; and the one man never works as hard, 

 unless during the general holiday. He works 

 regularly, with industrial intelligence in the 

 direction, and there is practically nothing else to 

 account for the difference. The cattle work is so 

 arranged that one man can do it all in three hours 

 a day. To make sure of this, I have done it all 

 myself, for weeks in succession, and found that, 

 barring accidents, I could get through with the 

 eighteen cattle and the horse in an hour and a half 

 twice a day. It takes a little longer when young 

 calves are fed three times a day, but this is only 

 a very short time in their lives. In addition to the 

 regular farming, the one-man equivalent finds 

 time for some other work every year, and the 

 improvements of a permanent kind effected for 

 the past ten years seem to be considerably more 

 than for the previous ten generations. A youth of 

 seventeen now in my employment (a typical 

 average lad) is worth more in his work than the 

 whole average family of five or six anywhere about 

 me, and I think he has a much better time of it 

 than they. He certainly lives at a far higher level, 

 both physically and mentally, with a collection of 

 standard literature at his disposal in the long 

 winter evenings when the day's work is done, 

 while the crowd of his age and class go hunting 

 from house to house and pelting the iron roofs 

 with stones for their amusement. He is the only 

 lad of the peasant class that I know in all Ireland 

 at present enjoying the least chance of an intel- 



