APPENDIX III. 371 



do with the deadened slowness which seems to per- 

 vade 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 Sun- 

 days. 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 flavour- 

 ing 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 en- 

 joyed 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 butcher's meat. 

 Philanthropic ladies, to my knowledge, have demon- 

 strated over and over again even to their limited capa- 



242 



