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
Sundays. 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 flavouring 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 enjoyed 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 butchers' meat.
Philanthropic ladies, to my knowledge, have demonstrated over and over
again even to their limited capacities that certain parts of butchers'
meat can be bought just as cheap, and will make more savoury and
nutritive food; and even now, with the present high price of meat, a
certain proportion would be advantageous. In vain; the labourers
obstinately adhere to the pig, and the pig only. When, however, an
opportunity does occur the amount of food they will eat is something
astonishing. Once a year, at the village club dinner, they gormandise to
repletion. In one instance I knew of a man eating a plate of roast beef
(and the slices are cut enormously thick at these dinners), a plate of
boiled beef, then another of boiled mutton, and then a fourth of roast
mutton, and a fifth of ham. He said he could not do much to the bread
and cheese; but didn't he go into the pudding! I have even heard of men
stuffing to the fullest extent of th