ust be conceded to the old style of life. Say that the
women's work was too incessant, and that some of it was distinctly ill
to do; yet, taken as a whole, it was not uninteresting, and it was just
that wholeness of it that made all the difference. The most tiresome
duties--those domestic cares which were destined to become so irksome to
women of a later day--were less tiresome because they were parts of a
whole. Through them all shone the promise of happier hours to be won by
their performance.

For although in this rough valley women might not achieve the finer
successes of cottage folk-life, where it led up into gracefulness and
serenity, in a coarser fashion the essential spirit of pride in capable
doing was certainly theirs. They could, and did, enjoy the satisfaction
of proficiency, and win respect for it from their neighbours. If they
were not neat, they were very handy; if there was no superlative finish
about their work, there was soundness of quality, which they knew would
be recognized as so much to their credit. Old gossip bears me out.
Conceive the nimble and self-confident temper of those two cottage
women--not in this village, I admit, but in the next one to it, and the
thing was quite possible here--who always planned to do their washing on
the same day, for the pleasure of seeing who had the most "pieces," and
the best, to hang out on the clothes-lines. The story must be seventy
years old, and I don't know who told it me; but it has always seemed to
me very characteristic of the good side of cottage life, whether one
thinks of the eager rivalry itself in the gardens, where the white
clothes flapped, or of the long record implied in it of careful
housewifery and quiet needlework. This spirit of joy in proficiency must
have sweetened many of the cottage duties, and may well have run through
them all. When a woman treated her friends to home-made wine at
Christmas, she was exhibiting to them her own skill; when she cut up the
loaf she had baked, or fried the bacon she had helped to cure, the good
result was personal to herself; the very turf she piled on the fire had
a homely satisfaction for her, because, cut as it was by her husband's
own tools, and smelling of the neighbouring heath as it burnt, it was
suggestive of the time-honoured economies of all the valley. In this way
another comfort was added to that of her own more personal pleasure. For
there was hardly a duty that the old-time village woman did