ne who chooses to turn the key
and enter. This practice of locking the door and leaving the key in it
is very prevalent. The presence of the key is to intimate that the
inmate has gone out, but will shortly return; and it is so understood by
the neighbours. If a cottager goes out for the day, he or she locks the
door, and takes the key with them; but if the key is left in the door,
it is a sign that the cottager will be back in ten minutes or so.

The alehouse is the terrible bane of the labourer. If he can keep clear
of that, he is clean, tidy, and respectable; but if he once falls into
drinking habits, good-bye to all hopes of his rising in his occupation.
Where he is born there will he remain, and his children after him.

Some of the cottagers who show a little talent for music combine under
the leadership of the parish clerk and the patronage of the clergyman,
and form a small brass band which parades the village at the head of the
Oddfellows or other benefit club once a year. In the early summer,
before the earnest work of harvest begins, and while the evenings begin
to grow long, it is not unusual to see a number of the younger men at
play at cricket in the meadow with the more active of the farmers. Most
populous villages have their cricket club, which even the richest
farmers do not disdain to join, and their sons stand at the wicket.

The summer is the labourer's good season. Then he can make money and
enjoy himself. In the summer three or four men will often join together
and leave their native parish for a ramble. They walk off perhaps some
forty or fifty miles, take a job of mowing or harvesting, and after a
change of scenery and associates, return in the later part of the
autumn, full of the things they have seen, and eager to relate them to
the groups at the cross-roads or the alehouse. The winter is under the
best circumstances a hard time for the labourer. It is not altogether
that coals are dear and firewood growing scarcer year by year, but every
condition of his daily life has a harshness about it. In the summer the
warm sunshine cast a glamour over the rude walls, the decaying thatch,
and the ivy-covered window. The blue smoke rose up curling beside the
tall elm-tree. The hedge parting his garden from the road was green and
thick, the garden itself full of trees, and flowers of more or less
beauty. Mud floors are not so bad in the summer; holes in the thatch do
not matter so much; an ill-fitting win