down."

In cottage households, though occasionally there might be some shortage
of food, there were no indications of anything like general or chronic
want. Indeed, if delicacies which the inmates had never seen before were
brought them as a present from this or from that "great house," they
would often eye them askance, and make a favor of taking them. That the
ordinary diet of the Devonshire cottagers of those days contented them
is shown by the dinner prepared for a man who worked at a limekiln by
his wife, which she complacently exhibited to my mother as at once
appetizing and nutritious. It was a species of dumpling with an onion,
instead of an apple, in the middle of it, the place of the customary
crust being taken by home-baked bread.

On the whole, however, the cottagers, no less than their richer
neighbors, were preoccupied by interests other than those of mere
domestic economy. Their gossip would accordingly take a wider range, as
when one of them announced to an aunt of mine that a son and a daughter
who had emigrated to the United States had "got stuck in the mud just
outside America."

Often their discourses would relate to domestic discipline and theology.
There was a certain Mrs. Pawley whose dwelling was widely celebrated as
the scene of almost constant strife between herself and her husband, and
who, on being asked by one of her lady patronesses if she could not do
something to make matters run more smoothly, replied: "That's just what
I tries to do, ma'am. I labor for peace, but when I speak to he thereof,
he makes hisself ready for battle direckly."

Another good woman again had acquired an unenviable fame by some petty
act of larceny which the magistrates had been bound to punish, and was
explaining in tears on her doorstep to some lady's sympathetic ears that
she had done the unfortunate deed merely because she was "temp'ed," on
which a neighbor, who had no need for repentance, promptly appeared on
the scene and said to her: "My dear crachur (creature), why be you
temp'ed to do sich thing? I be never temp'ed to do nothing but what's
good."

Passing one day through an orchard, Mr. Froude the historian encountered
a man who was contemplating a heap of apples. The man looked up as
though about to speak of the crop, but instead of doing so he gave vent
to the following reflection: "Pretty job, sir," he said, "there was
about a apple one time. Now the De-vine, He might have prevented that if
He'd h