Rural England 
their families is nothing short of a miracle; but it is 
a miracle of hardship and of patience under constant 
suffering. 
It may be suggested that, although this is the harsh 
letter of the labourer’s contract of service, there is 
room for generous interpretation of it. Room, 
indeed, there is in abundance, but it remains unoc¬ 
cupied. Here is a case of very recent occurrence in 
our village, followed by another, not so recent and 
not in our village, to show that our farmer acted in 
the spirit of his contemporaries in the district. Not 
long before the March quarter day the wife of a 
stalwart young labourer receiving los. (^2.50) a week 
presented him with twins. About the same time 
he was bitten in the hand while handling a rat incau¬ 
tiously. The wound did not heal rapidly, probably 
because the man’s blood was poor from inadequate 
nourishment, and an abscess compelled him to relin¬ 
quish work and “go on his club” immediately before 
quarter-day. A quarterly payment being due, the 
club officers were clearly bound to deduct that from 
the first payment of sick benefit, which left exactly 
2s. (50 cents) to he handed over to the incapacitated 
man, with a wife and twins, for a week’s sustenance. 
IS. lod. (45 cents) were due him for wages, and of 
that his master deducted is. (25 cents) for a week’s 
rent of the cottage. That was the last straw, and I 
protest that it is difficult to say whether my heart 
bleeds or my blood boils to hear that this finely built 
and sturdy young fellow broke down altogether, and 
forgot that he was a man, over the deduction of that 
shilling. Was this an act of cruelty on the part of the 
farmer, a man who holds many hundreds of acres 
and owns some of them in fee, a man who knew that 
he was absolutely safe of his rent, unless the labourer 
died, in the long run .? Certainly it was not.an act 
of conscious cruelty. It was but conduct in accord¬ 
ance with the custom of the country. Not so very 
long ago, near another village in the same county, a 
labourer engaged in the task of “shrouding” an elm 
(cutting off the side branches for firewood and pea- 
sticks) fell from his perch and lay unconscious until 
somebody found him and took him home. Not 
permanently the worse for his fall, he returned to 
work in a day or two and went to receive his wages as 
usual on pay-day. To whom his master: 
“ John do ee mind about what time it wor as ee 
fell down ? ” 
“ I thinks it wor just about eleven.” 
And the wages for that day, meagre as they would 
have been anyhow, were reduced pro rata. 
Even when the labourer is not laid up by illness or 
accident, when it is not too wet to go on the land, and 
when he is not turned off as a superfluous hand in 
winter, he has a cruel struggle to make both ends 
meet. He and his family subsist for the most part, 
and to quite as great an extent as the Irish peasant, 
on potatoes, the produce of the allotment; and when 
the potato crop is poor and diseased, as it was all 
but universally last year, by reason of the wet, his 
uncomplaining suffering is pitiful. One reads about 
gaunt faces in connection with important strikes, in 
which strike pay is equal to full wages in our village, 
but one sees them here. Recently, when a spell of 
fine weather in early spring caused all the hands 
turned off for the winter to be in demand, I failed to 
recognise the cheery face of a carter who touched his 
hat to me at the station; and it was only after 
a while that I realized the face to be that of a man 
turned off for the winter, to whom I had given a few 
days’ work, not for charity, but in my own interests, 
at Christmas time. He had been emaciated, worn 
with hunger in fact; he was now an entirely changed 
man. 
Sometimes we are able to do some small act of 
kindness by way of alleviating the prevailing suffer¬ 
ing, sometimes to give work, the results of which 
enure for our own benefit, and in each case the 
resultant gratitude is touching in the extreme. It 
is no mere matter of lip-service. Our villagers, 
indeed, civil and soft-spoken though they are as a 
rule, are not voluble, and their vocabulary is limited. 
Those who are voluble are usually imposters also. 
In the case of the others the bread cast upon the 
waters comes back after many days. Last year, we 
gave milk for a month or so to support the fourteenth 
puny child of a woman whose husband earned I2s. 
(^3.00) a week. But in the autumn came humble 
presents of cans of blackberries and of mushrooms. 
Again to my friend of the changed countenance I 
gave nothing but work and very modest pay. But 
it happened that the work was the excavation of an 
ancient ditch, and in it he found a copper coin, a 
token probably, bearing a representation of Lady 
Godiva, in which we were interested. He said little 
or nothing; but a day or two later brought as an 
offering a bag containing some score of ancient coins, 
or coins more or less ancient, which he had turned 
up with his spade in the course of a long life of 
labour. It seemed almost a shame to accept them; 
but to have refused them would have been to inflict 
a grievous wound. 
Our villagers marry and are given in marriage, 
and the potato diet, as in Ireland, is accompanied by 
large families; but it is regarded as part of the natural 
course of events that death should thin those families 
abundantly. “I do hope,” said a ministering kins¬ 
woman of the mother of the twins, “that if the Lard 
takes either of ’em, it’ll be the little gell.” She 
herself, in days of motherhood long gone by, had 
nursed children when she had no sustenance for her¬ 
self or for them beyond hot water run through a tea¬ 
pot containing a few crusts of bread. The pathos of 
these simple facts needs no emphasis. 
In one respect our village is better oft than many 
another in these parts that is more prosperous. 
