ntioned how sounds will travel across the valley, and I have known
women come to their cottage doors high up on this side to carry on a
shouting conversation with neighbours opposite, four hundred yards away.
You see, they were under no constraint of propriety in its accepted
forms, nor did they care greatly who heard what they had to say. I have
sometimes wished that they did care. But, of course, the more
comfortable way of intercourse was to talk across the quickset hedge
between two gardens. Sometimes one would hear--all an afternoon it
seemed--the long drone of one of these confabulations going on in
unbroken flow, with little variation of cadence, save for a moaning rise
and fall, like the wind through a keyhole. I have a suspicion that the
shortcomings of neighbours often made the staple of such conversations,
but that is only a surmise. I remember the strange conclusion of one of
them which reached my ears. For, as the women reluctantly parted, they
raised their voices, and one said piously, "Wal, they'll git paid for
't, one o' these days. Gawd A'mighty's above the Devil"; to which the
other, with loud conviction: "Yes, and always will be, thank Gawd!" This
ended the talk. But the last speaker, turning round, saw her
two-year-old daughter asprawl in the garden, and with sudden change from
satisfied drawl to shrill exasperation, "Git up out of all that muck,
you dirty little devil," she said. For she was a cleanly woman, proud of
her children, and disliking to see them untidy.

III

MAN AND WIFE

For general social intercourse the labouring people do not meet at one
another's cottages, going out by invitation, or dropping in to tea in
the casual way of friendship; they have to be content with "passing the
time of day" when they come together by chance. Thus two families may
mingle happily as they stroll homewards after the Saturday night's
shopping in the town, or on a fine Sunday evening they may make up
little parties to go and inspect one another's gardens.

Until recently--so recently that the slight change may be ignored at
least for the present--the prevailing note of this so restricted
intercourse was a sort of _bonhomie_, or good temper and good sense.
With this for a guide, the people had no need of the etiquette called
"good manners," but were at liberty to behave as they liked, and talk as
they liked, within the bounds of neighbourliness and civility. This has
always been one of the most c