the tea, drink it, wash up the
things, sweep up the fire-place, and put all to rights again, in a less
space of time, upon an average, than _two hours_. However, let us allow
_one hour_; and here we have a woman occupied no less than three hundred
and sixty-five hours in the year, or thirty whole days, at twelve hours in
the day; that is to say, one month out of the twelve in the year, besides
the waste of the man's time in hanging about waiting for the tea! Needs
there any thing more to make us cease to wonder at seeing labourers'
children with dirty linen and holes in the heels of their stockings?
Observe, too, that the time thus spent is, one half of it, the best time
of the day. It is the top of the morning, which, in every calling of life,
contains an hour worth two or three hours of the afternoon. By the time
that the clattering tea tackle is out of the way, the morning is spoiled;
its prime is gone; and any work that is to be done afterwards lags heavily
along. If the mother have to go out to work, the tea affair must all first
be over. She comes into the field, in summer time, when the sun has gone a
third part of his course. She has the heat of the day to encounter,
instead of having her work done and being ready to return home at any
early hour. Yet early she must go, too: for, there is the fire again to
be made, the clattering tea-tackle again to come forward; and even in the
longest day she must have _candle light_, which never ought to be seen in
a cottage (except in case of illness) from March to September.

24. Now, then, let us take the bare cost of the use of tea. I suppose a
pound of tea to last twenty days; which is not nearly half an ounce every
morning and evening. I allow for each mess half a pint of milk. And I
allow three pounds of the red dirty sugar to each pound of tea. The
account of expenditure would then stand very high; but to these must be
added the amount of the tea tackle, one set of which will, upon an
average, be demolished every year. To these outgoings must be added the
cost of beer at the public-house; for some the man will have, after all,
and the woman too, unless they be upon the point of actual starvation. Two
pots a week is as little as will serve in this way; and here is a dead
loss of ninepence a week, seeing that two pots of beer, full as strong,
and a great deal better, can be brewed at home for threepence. The account
of the year's tea drinking will then stand thus: