re was not one
cottage in which it could be drawn from a tap, but it all had to be
fetched from well or tank. And in the husband's absence at work, it was
the woman's duty--one more added to so many others--to bring water
indoors. In times of drought water had often to be carried long
distances in pails, and it may be imagined how the housework would go in
such circumstances. For my part I have never wondered at roughness or
squalor in the village since that parching summer when I learnt that in
one cottage at least the people were saving up the cooking water of one
day to be used over again on the day following. Where such things can
happen the domestic arts are simplified to nothing, and it would be
madness in women to cultivate refinement or niceness.

And my neighbours appeared not to wish to cultivate them. It may be
added that many of the women--the numbers are diminishing rapidly--were
field-workers who had never been brought up to much domesticity. Far
beyond the valley they had to go to earn money at hop-tying, haymaking,
harvesting, potato-picking, swede-trimming, and at such work they came
immediately, just as the men did, under conditions which made it a vice
to flinch. As a rule they would leave work in the afternoon in time to
get home and cook a meal in readiness for their husbands later, and at
that hour one saw them on the roads trudging along, under the burden of
coats, dinner-baskets, tools, and so on, very dishevelled--for at
field-work there is no such thing as care for the toilet--but often
chatting not unhappily.

On the roads, too, women were, and still are, frequently noticeable,
bringing home on their backs faggots of dead wood, or sacks of
fir-cones, picked up in the fir-woods a mile away or more. Prodigious
and unwieldy loads these were. I have often met women bent nearly double
under them, toiling painfully along, with hats or bonnets pushed awry
and skirts draggling. Occasionally tiny urchins, too small to be left at
home alone, would be clinging to their mothers' frocks.

In the scanty leisure that the women might enjoy--say now and then of an
afternoon--there were not many circumstances to counteract the hardness
contracted at their work. These off times were opportunities for social
intercourse between them. They did not leave home, however, and go out
"paying calls." Unless on Sunday evenings visiting one another's
cottages was not desirable. But there were other resources. I have
me