t.

These are some of the lights and shades of the labourer's daily life
impartially presented.

_FIELD-FARING WOMEN._

If a thoughtful English peasant-woman rejoiced that in her house a son
was born, it would be, not because "she had gotten a man from the Lord,"
but a thanksgiving that it was not a girl. That most natural
thanksgiving of the Hebrew woman is too rarely heard in the rural
cottage, situated though it may be in the midst of meadows and fields
abounding with the fat of the earth. The fact that a fresh being has
entered upon life, with all its glorious possibilities, is not a subject
for joy.

"Well, John," the farmer says to his man, "your wife has been confined,
hasn't she? How's the young one?"

"Aw, sir, a' be main weak and picked, an' like _to go back_--thank God!"
replies the labourer with intense satisfaction, especially if he has two
or three children already. "Picked" means thin, sharp-featured, wasted,
emaciated. "To go back" is to die. The man does not like to say "die,"
therefore he puts it "to go back"--_i.e._, whence it came; from the
unknown. Yet, with all this hard indifference, the labourer is as fond
of his children as any one else. The "ego" that utters those apparently
heartless words is not the real man, it is the "ego" produced by long
experience of the hardships of poverty; of coarse fare, rude labour,
exposure. After all, it is in a spirit of tenderness towards the infant
that the parent half desires it to die. The real "ego," the true man,
delights as all humanity does in watching the growth of the tiny limbs,
the expansion of the instincts into mind, and the first employment of
that mind. He feels as Marguerite in _Faust_ felt, tending the
babe--"the holiest of all joys." But life is very, very hard, and
circumstances push him out of himself. Still more do these hardships
tell upon his wife; and so it is, knowing what her sex have to go
through, that she welcomes a boy more than a girl. An aged agricultural
woman said she would sooner have seven boys than one girl; for the
former, when they became lads, went out and earned their own living,
but the girls you never knew when they were got rid of--they were always
coming back. This expressed the practical view of the matter. But
supposing that the child should prove a girl; it must not be imagined
that it receives any ruder treatment in mere infancy than a boy would
have had. In early infancy children have no sex. But th