174 THE SOUTH COUNTRY 



where her husband was half-naked in the midst of his 

 Saturday wash. Taking no notice of him she led me into 

 the sitting-room and, with a huge loaf held like a violin, 

 began buttering and cutting thin slices while she talked 

 to me, to the little children and to her husband, from the 

 adjacent kitchen. She was tall, straight as a pillar, black- 

 haired, with clear untanned but slightly swarthy skin, 

 black eyes, kindly gleaming cheeks and red lips smiling 

 above her broad breast and hips. Her clothes were black 

 but in rags that hardly clung to her shoulders and waist. 

 She was barely five and twenty, but had six young children 

 about her, one in a cradle by the hearth and another still 

 crawling at her feet. Her only embarrassment came 

 when I asked to pay for my tea — she began adding up the 

 cost, a pennyworth of bread and butter, a halfpennyworth 

 of tea, etc. ! The kitchen consisted simply of a large 

 grate and baking oven, plain tables and chairs on a flagged 

 floor. But the sitting-room was a museum — with photo- 

 graphs of a volunteer corps, of friends and relations on 

 the wall over the fire; foxgloves in jam-pots surrounded 

 by green crinkled paper in the fireplace; on the mantel- 

 piece, cheap little vases and scraps of ore and more photo- 

 graphs. On the walls were three pictures : one of two 

 well-dressed children being timidly inspected by fallow 

 deer; another of a grandmother showing a book to a child 

 whose attention is diverted by the frolics of two kittens 

 at her side; and a third of Jesus, bleeding and crowned 

 with thorns, high on a cross over a marble city beneath a 

 romantic forest ridge, behind which was the conflagration 

 of a crimson sunset. 



Other sitting-rooms were similarly adorned, with the 

 addition of a picture of John Wesley as a child escaping 



