farmer never interfered; indeed, he was sometimes glad to
see the show. Every other weaver in Thrums used to have a son a
ploughman, and it was the men from the bothies who filled the square on
the muckly. "Hands" are not huddled together nowadays in squalid barns
more like cattle than men and women, but bothies in the neighbourhood
of Thrums are not yet things of the past. Many a ploughman delves his
way to and from them still in all weathers, when the snow is on the
ground; at the time of "hairst," and when the turnip "shaws" have just
forced themselves through the earth, looking like straight rows of
green needles. Here is a picture of a bothy of to-day that I visited
recently. Over the door there is a waterspout that has given way, and
as I entered I got a rush of rain down my neck. The passage was so
small that one could easily have stepped from the doorway on to the
ladder standing against the wall, which was there in lieu of a
staircase. "Upstairs" was a mere garret, where a man could not stand
erect even in the centre. It was entered by a square hole in the
ceiling, at present closed by a clap-door in no way dissimilar to the
trap-doors on a theatre stage. I climbed into this garret, which is at
present used as a store-room for agricultural odds and ends. At
harvest-time, however, it is inhabited--full to overflowing. A few
decades ago as many as fifty labourers engaged for the harvest had to
be housed in the farm out-houses on beds of straw. There was no help
for it, and men and women had to congregate in these barns together.
Up as early as five in the morning, they were generally dead tired by
night; and, miserable though this system of herding them together was,
they took it like stoics, and their very number served as a moral
safeguard. Nowadays the harvest is gathered in so quickly, and
machinery does so much that used to be done by hand, that this crowding
of labourers together, which was the bothy system at its worst, is
nothing like what it was. As many as six or eight men, however, are
put up in the garret referred to during "hairst"-time, and the female
labourers have to make the best of it in the barn. There is no doubt
that on many farms the two sexes have still at this busy time to herd
together even at night.

The bothy was but scantily furnished, though it consisted of two rooms.
In the one, which was used almost solely as a sleeping apartment, there
was no furniture to speak of, b