90 WILD LIFE IN A SOUTHERN COUNTY. 



their weekly dole. His father told him that he had 

 himself stood there hungry, with the rest not broken- 

 down cripples and widows, but strong, hale men, wait- 

 ing till the loaves were placed upon the broad slab, 

 so that the living were fed literally over the grave of 

 the dead. 



The farmers met every now and then in the vestry 

 and arranged how many men each would find work 

 for or rather partial work so that the amount of 

 relief might be apportioned. Men coming from a dis- 

 tance, or even from the next parish, were jealously 

 excluded from settling, lest there should be more 

 mouths to feed ; if a family, on the other hand, 

 could by any possibility be got rid of, it was exiled. 

 There were more hands than work ; now the case 

 is precisely opposite. A grim witness, this old tomb, 

 to a traditionary fragment in that history of the people 

 which is now placed above a mere list of monarchs. 



The oldest person in the village was a woman as is 

 often the case reputed to be over a hundred : a tidy 

 cottager, well tended, feeble in body, but brisk of 

 tongue. She reckoned her own age by the thatch of 

 the roof. It had been completely new thatched five 

 times since she could recollect. The first tune she 

 was a great girl, grown up ; her father had it thatched 

 twice afterwards ; her husband had it done the fourth 

 time, and the fifth was three years ago. That made 

 about a hundred years altogether. 



The straw had lasted better lately, because there 

 were now no great elm trees to drip, drip on it in wet 



