ful to look at the few
cottages in the valley still inhabited by their owners, and to compare
them with those let to weekly tenants. It seems to be no question of
income that makes the difference between the two. In several cottages
very well known to me, the owners are not earning more than fifteen
shillings a week--or, including the value of the cottage, twenty
shillings; yet the places, in their varied ways, all look comfortable
and comely. Fruit-trees, or grape-vines, or roses, are trained to the
walls. The boundary hedges are kept well trimmed; here and there
survives a box border--product of many years of clipping--or even a
yew-tree or two fancifully shaped out. Here and there, too, leading to
the cottage door, is carefully preserved an example of those neat
pavements of local stone once so characteristic of this countryside; and
in all these things one sees what the average cottager would do if it
were worth while--if he had the heart. Since none of these things,
however, can be had without long attention, or, at any rate, without
skill carefully bestowed in due season, you do not find such things
decorating the homes of weekly tenants. The cottages let by the week
look shabby, slovenly, dingy; the hedges of the gardens are neglected,
broken down, stopped up with anything that comes to hand. If it were not
for the fruitful and well-tended vegetable plots, one might often
suppose the tenants to be ignorant of order, degenerate, brutalized,
materialized, so sordid and ugly are their homes.

Yet it is not for want of taste that they endure these conditions.
Amidst the pitiful shabbiness which prevails may be found many little
signs that the delight in comely things would go far if it dared. There
is hardly a garden in the village, I think, which does not contain a
corner or a strip given over unthriftily, not to useful vegetables, but
to daffodils or carnations or dahlias, or to the plants of sweet scent
and pleasant names, like rosemary and lavender, and balm, and
mignonette. And not seldom a weekly tenant, desirous of beauty, goes
farther, takes his chance of losing his pains; nails up against his
doorway some makeshift structure of fir-poles to be a porch, sowing
nasturtiums or sweet-peas to cover it with their short-lived beauty; or
he marks out under his window some little trumpery border to serve
instead of a box-hedge as safeguard to his flowers. One of those
families whose removal was mentioned above--turne